


Bound to the Tracks of the Train

by easternepiphany



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Violence, mentions of past sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 05:35:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easternepiphany/pseuds/easternepiphany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeff struggles with life post-grad. Britta feels suffocated by Greendale. Just because they're good-looking doesn't make them villains. Until it does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Time for really long author's notes, I apologize in advance. 
> 
> This was written for [Het Big Bang 2013](http://het-bigbang.livejournal.com). A few things you should know before you begin: this story contains the "graphic depictions of violence" warning because I believe it's better to over-warn than under-warn. Basically, the violence isn't that graphic or descriptive, but it is there, so if you have any hesitations about reading it, please feel free to talk to me about it! 
> 
> I began planning and writing this before Advanced Intro to Finality aired, and so I basically picked and chose which elements from that episode to include. You'll notice that Jeff mentions his Darkest Timeline daydream, but he isn't offered the job with his old firm, and also the group takes the second semester of Cornwallis's History class instead of astrology or whatever they're taking in season five. Pierce is also gone, although I had to write him off myself since the show didn't do it for me! As far as the timeline goes, I adjusted season four's wonky timeline in order to fit a more real-world version; so Jeff graduated in December 2012 instead of... who knows, really.
> 
> Lastly, THANK YOU to Libby for your encouragement and support and help, as well as for fielding "does this make sense?" text messages, putting up with me blathering about this for the last three-plus months, and generally being an A+ human and friend. I love you! Please get your puppy pics ready.
> 
> ETA: check out beautiful, beautiful art for this story [here](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Het_Big_Little_Bang_2013/works/943392)!

**This is how it begins:**

You see, three and a half years feels like a lifetime but it’s really just the blink of an eye, certainly not long enough for people to forget. So when Jeff graduates and mails out his resume, makes phone calls, and sends emails, nothing happens. Well, not exactly nothing. He does get responses, mostly consisting of pitiful tones and flowery language: “You’re a great lawyer, Jeff, but after what happened, we’re unable to take the risk.”

Because he’s a risk now. He’s something people and firms avoid like the plague. He calls in every favor he thought he had but December turns to January turns to February turns to March and he spends his days at Greendale still, hunkered down on the couch in the back of the study room and surviving off the free sandwiches Shirley supplies him with.

Being a lawyer is the only thing he knows how to do. It’s all he’s ever _wanted_ to do, really, to stand in front of the jury and use big words and emphasize all the right syllables. It’s what he’s good at.

(The fact that the only thing he’s good at is bullshitting people does not escape his radar. However, after almost four years, Jeff’s pretty much over the whole self-discovery arc.)

So… all that, all the mental breakdowns and the ridiculous themed dances and the paintballs to the chest and the alternate timelines, all he has to show for it is a piece of paper and a dent in the study room couch from his ass. He thought he’d have it all but he doesn’t; he sits with his phone clutched in his fist, willing it to vibrate, but when it does it’s always either another rejection or a call from his mother because she hasn’t heard from him. She doesn’t know the half of it and he can’t bring himself to tell her. So her calls go to voicemail and they pile up next to the standard “We’re sorry, Mr. Winger, but we’ve decided to go in another direction.”

The group reassures him, tells him there are a lot of other things he can do while he’s waiting for someone else to fuck up even worse so he looks good by comparison. Well, they don’t add the second part—he adds it himself, because really, that’s what he’s waiting for. He wakes up every morning wondering if today is the day Alan’s going to get caught doing coke in the bathroom of the courthouse. He just needs someone, anyone, to make a mistake so they need him, so they call him and say, “Please, Jeff, we have this case and no one can take it but you.”

Because even at Greendale, Jeff’s not needed anymore. The group assembles around the table each day and suddenly the head has flipped and Troy’s sitting at it. They joke and they laugh and they sit through the second semester of Cornwallis’s history class without a beat. He once thought he was the thread that connected them all but as they put the finishing touches on their Great Depression diorama they don’t seem very threadless. They seem to have forgotten him, in the corner on the couch, headphones over his ears as he pretends to be listening to music but is actually eavesdropping.

And suddenly, he has nothing. He had thought the day he was disbarred was rock bottom. But at least then he’d been under the delusion he had somewhere to go. Jeff feels so _stupid_ because he kept going for so _long_ thinking once he got that degree he’d be all set. He let the lull of Greendale fool him into thinking he was a big shot.

And now he sits, every day, feeling himself waste away. He was always delusional enough to believe he’d been destined for more than this but every bad decision he’s ever made plays for him on the backs of his eyelids and the group’s laughs are like needles in his skin. It’s over; it was over eight years ago when he decided to do this, it was over the day his father left, it was over the day he was born, because if you cut Jeff Winger open his insides are probably all black.

The thing that’s been keeping Britta going is an overwhelming need to prove everyone wrong. “I’ll be a great therapist,” she repeats as a mantra every morning as she drags herself out of bed to go to class and study group and duck her head as everyone ridicules her. But suddenly there are only six weeks left in the semester and she should be on track to graduating but the thing they don’t tell you is that when you stumble around until your third year of school before choosing a major, you’re going to be there for a while.

It’s the longest Britta’s been in one place since she was a teenager and she’s starting to feel suffocated by the routine, by seeing the same buildings and streets every morning on her drive to school. She dreams that the arms on her chair in the study room turn to ropes and tie her down, binding her forever to Greendale and a life she’s not sure she wants anymore. She’s restless, shakes her leg while she sits and taps her pen against her notebook so loud that Annie huffs and scoffs and Abed starts stealing her pens at the beginning of the hour.

She stays late in the study room sometimes, psych notes spread around her, and she remembers the day she told the group about her new major and they all laughed at her. She thinks about grad school and not getting in or getting in and then settling into a nine-to-five and paying taxes and having an office with a leather chair. She tries to picture herself sitting behind a desk and jotting notes on a legal pad while someone pays her to solve their problems when she can’t even figure out her own. She remembers trying to help Abed and gets embarrassed all over again because _really_?

She begins to regress: she starts smoking again, sitting in her parked car between classes, the window rolled down just a crack. She spends all her money on gum and mints and Febreeze but she knows how transparent she is to everyone else. They never say anything and Britta can’t tell if it’s because they really don’t notice or if they don’t care or if they pity her for whatever reason.

Everything is… off. Everyone else seems so confident in what they’re doing with their lives and everything is finally, finally falling into place for all of them. And Britta’s not going to deny them their happiness because she knows how hard they’ve all worked for it, but she can’t help but feel left behind. Shirley and Annie will graduate in May, Pierce is off living on an island his father part-owned, Troy and Abed have resigned themselves to another semester of Greendale to focus on completing their degrees. The smile she wears begins to crack at the edges and on the weekends she sleeps in later and later, not waking up until the sun begins to slowly disappear, because faking it every day is getting exhausting.

**And then:**

One day in mid-April Britta cuts class to sit on the couch with Jeff, who slumps with his laptop balanced on his stomach. He claims to be looking for jobs but he’s really watching _The Powerpuff Girls_ on Netflix. It’s a little embarrassing, Britta thinks.

“Why are you here every day?” she asks.

On screen, Buttercup is scowling with her arms crossed over her chest and Britta looks down to see herself in the same pose. She sits on her hands instead.

“Because if I wander into the cafeteria later Shirley will give me a tuna wrap and I’m out of food at my place.”

He’s got a weird beard going on and his hair is mussed and his shirt is wrinkled and it reminds her of that time he got evicted and lived with Abed and reverted back to a nineteen year old.

“Don’t you have class?”

She shrugs and reaches over to turn up the volume. “Do you ever think life would just be easier if someone spilled Chemical X on you and you could just be a superhero and not have to worry about school or jobs or people liking you?”

“You’d be Buttercup,” he says, reaching over to poke her leg.

“Yeah, well, you’d be Blossom,” she retorts. “All pretentiousness and big speeches.”

“Are you flunking out?”

“I dropped one of my classes,” she admits. “Don’t tell the group.”

The episode ends and Netflix counts down to the next one. Jeff closes the laptop and turns to Britta. “Wanna go have sex?”

* * *

So they start sleeping together again; only, this time it’s different because Britta didn’t tell him she loved him in a room full of people months before and whatever was between them last semester has cooled. Instead of rules and code names and tiptoeing around a minefield of feelings, it’s just the two of them having sex and eating take-out he scams from Shirley’s and slowly making their way through every episode of _The Powerpuff Girls_. She keeps skipping classes until some days she doesn’t even bother going to Greendale at all and she and Jeff stay in bed and smoke weed and don’t get dressed.

There's less of a sharpness now—it's smoother and easier and rounder, curves where it once was angles. There's nothing to prove anymore, not to each other or themselves. It's simple and Britta likes this version more than the first. She got off on sneaking around once upon a time but now she just gets off on _him_ , on the familiarity and the comfort and his mouth and hands.

On the days she doesn’t go to school at all, Annie and Shirley come by to make sure she’s still alive. They wrinkle their noses in disgust because Britta’s pretty sure the apartment reeks of weed and body odor, but they very politely don’t say anything about Jeff on her couch in boxers and a t-shirt.

She withdraws from the rest of her classes and suddenly her transcript is littered with Incompletes. She can re-take classes in the summer or the fall if she wants. But right now, she’s not sure if she wants to or not; she feels kind of stuck.

They finish _The Powerpuff Girls_ and Jeff’s beard is thick and ugly. It chafes on her face and her breasts and her thighs and one day she comes home from the grocery store with a razor and shaving cream, hoping he’ll get the hint. He doesn’t.

“I kinda like it,” he says as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Yeah, well, you’re not the one walking around with beard burn all over your body,” she mutters. She’s in the shower using the razor because, hey, she paid for it, didn’t she? But it’s a men’s razor and she nicks her legs a dozen times and the water turns red as it swirls down the drain.

When she turns off the water he’s still standing at the mirror, examining himself, but it’s with less enthusiasm than he used to. She wraps a towel around her body and sits on the closed toilet lid, sticking band-aids to all her cuts.

“We should do something,” she says as she gathers up the band-aid wrappers and throws them away.

“Like what? There’s nothing I really want to do.”

“That’s what I mean. We used to want to do things. We had goals. We left the house every once in a while. Now I’m a two-time dropout and you have a beard. What happened to us?”

He shrugs. “What happened is that you and I were naïve. We thought we were doing the right thing but there is no right thing for us. You fuck up once you fuck up a million times. Me and you, we’re not cut out for all that.”

“For all what?”

“Success. Normalcy. We’re not the heroes. We’re not Blossom and Buttercup.”

“Okay, that’s a lot we have to unpack,” she says. “I think I need clothes for this conversation. And we probably shouldn’t have it in the bathroom.”

There’s an urge—small, tiny, something she thought she’d never feel again—to sit down and psycho-analyze him. A beam of hope springs up inside of her: her friend is in some sort of bad mental state and _she can help_. This will be like Thanksgiving but better. She’ll really help instead of just accidentally help.

But as she shrugs on a t-shirt and sweatpants, mindful of her still-bleeding legs, she starts to think about his words and how—even if she’s not entirely sure what they mean yet—he might ultimately be right.

She finds him sprawled out on the couch in the living room. He’s on his phone, fingers moving almost lazily over the keys. She can’t help wonder, the way she always does whenever she sees him with a phone in hand now, if he’s texting no one.

“What did you mean?” she asks as she sits in the chair opposite him. “We’re not cut out for normalcy?”

He nods. “Or getting what we want. We spent this whole time thinking that if we worked hard we’d succeed. Haven’t you worked hard these last four years? Put everything into your psych classes and stayed up late studying for tests and writing papers?”

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Well, maybe not _everything_ , but I’ve tried.”

“And where has it gotten you? Right back where you started.”

“But what about you? You did it all legit this time. You made it through Greendale. You got your degree.”

He scratches his beard and it makes a horrible sound. “Yeah, well, look where I am now. No one in a fifty mile radius will hire me.”

“So leave,” she shrugs. “There’s a great big world out there outside of Greendale. You don’t have to stay here forever.”

He shoots her a look as if that suggestion is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. She’s not sure if it’s because of the group and his inability to move on from them and Greendale, but he makes it pretty clear that he won’t be moving away anytime soon. So she shrugs again.

“Okay, so _you_ messed up. You made a mistake and now you’re paying for it,” she says. “But what about me? What the hell did I do?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way—”

“Too late.”

“—but there’s something about you… I’m not sure what it is. Something that happened to you that you don’t want to tell me. And that’s fine, it’s whatever, but something happened to you and it made you…”

Britta begins to feel a little nauseous because it’s just like Jeff Winger to pinpoint her entire existence in one depressed epiphany. “Made me what?” she asks, even though she doesn’t want to know. It’s like that time Abed imagined her as a robot, and then a few weeks later Annie accused her of not reacting to anything appropriately. She knows there’s tar and sparking wires where her heart is supposed to be, but she’s tried her entire life to fool other people into imagining she’s whole.

“Hard. Off, somehow. Honestly, it’s probably why I like you so much.”

“Like me?”

He makes a vague gesture with his hands. “You know. Me and you. We’re kind of... a team.”

She pulls her legs up underneath her and the cat jumps onto the arm of the chair. She strokes Daniel’s fur and he purrs into her hand. “You know exactly how to make me feel like shit about myself and like you care about me all in the same breath.”

He smirks at her from under his beard and she rolls her eyes and smirks back.

They sit in silence then, Jeff on his phone and Britta with the cat, and she wonders if what he said is true. She’s managed to put that birthday party behind her as best as she knew how, but he pops into her mind every once in a while, his yellowing teeth and beady eyes and greasy hair. He’d taken off the head part of the costume after she came into the back room and he smelled like the bourbon and Cokes her grandfather used to drink and to this day, even the bottle of Jim Beam makes Britta break into a cold sweat. Sometimes she dreams about it, about her frustrated tears in the manager’s office and how she was so mad at herself for crying because she believed that was the reason no one was taking her seriously.

And maybe that was when it all started. When her dad led her out of the restaurant, his grip too tight on her hand, the guy had the audacity to wink at her from the window. So she went home and hid under the covers for five days, missing out on Halloween, and her princess costume hung unworn in the closet and her mother complained about how much it cost. When she emerged from bed she started drawing flaming meteors on her jeans and her friends stopped talking to her. And her teachers labeled her a problem child because she took a week-long vow of silence and refused to do her homework. And her parents wrote her off as being unnecessarily rebellious and she dyed her hair every color of the rainbow and slept with boys who called her names. And she dropped out of high school and ran away the first chance she got.

She’s never told Jeff any of this and he’s never asked. She thought he might, back on Thanksgiving, when she found out more about him than she’d ever bargained for. But one thing she’ll say about Jeff Winger: he’s never pushed. Even now, he scrolls through his phone lazily and he knows there’s something, but he’ll never come straight out and ask her what it is. She knows he’ll listen if she chooses to tell him, but he’s not going to press the issue. And Britta’s pretty grateful for that.

**And so:**

The rest of the group makes an effort to include Jeff and Britta in their off-campus activities, but when Jeff and Britta show up at Troy, Abed, and Annie’s for dinner or movie nights, it’s always a little strained, as though there’s a line dividing the four of them and the two of them. So sometimes Troy calls Jeff and invites him to guys’ night and Britta knows Annie is the one behind it because Britta gets calls about mall trips or coffee dates with her and Shirley. It’s as if the rest of the group can only handle Jeff and Britta one-on-one, as if both of them together is too much, too sad, too _something_ they don’t know how to deal with.

The semester is about to end when Annie calls Britta and asks her if she’s free on Saturday. “The Transfer Dance is next week, and since it’s my last big Greendale hurrah, I want to look nice,” Annie says. “Would you go shopping with me and help me pick something out?”

On the list of words Britta could go the rest of her life never hearing again, _transfer_ and _dance_ are way up at the top. But she says yes anyway and Annie lets out an adorable squeal and chatters on a little bit about also grabbing lunch and all the stores they can go to. Once upon a time Britta and Annie were friends and they spent their Saturdays at the mall. They gossiped about the study group and Britta reluctantly admitted that she’d seen way more romantic comedies than she let on. So they saw _Valentine’s Day_ one Friday night, gorging themselves on popcorn and Hershey’s bars and on the ride home Britta told Annie stories about bad dates she’d gone on until they were both hunched over, laughing, tears blurring their vision.

But then boys got in the way (or, _boy_ , singular; or, _man_ , because Jeff would not take kindly to being referred to as a boy, and really, calling him a boy after fucking him every night makes Britta skin crawl a little) and Britta became the sort of girl she always hated because she was once all about female empowerment and the importance of female friendships but then one of her closest female friends (okay, one of her only two female friends) kissed a guy she liked and that was the end of that. So if Annie is calling and asking Britta for her help instead of Shirley, that means Annie wants to form a truce of some sort or maybe she’s just concerned about Britta’s sudden reclusiveness. Either way, Britta agrees to spend her Saturday in department store dressing rooms dodging questions about her life.

When she hangs up the phone Jeff gives her a look but he doesn’t say anything.

“I’m going shopping with Annie on Saturday,” she says after a few minutes of silence.

They’re sitting at the kitchen table picking at leftover Chinese food from the night before. They haven’t left the apartment in three days.

“She wants me to help her find a dress for the Transfer Dance.”

“She’s going to that?” Jeff asks.

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t gone since... you know.”

“Me neither.”

He sets his fork down on the table and pushes his chair back a little. He’s silent, like he is a lot of the time now, as if he used up all his words earning that useless bachelor’s degree. So she slides out of her chair and walks around the table before settling in his lap. His arm comes around her waist and he runs his fingers along the band of her sweatpants.

She leans down to kiss him and he tastes like soy sauce. When she pulls back it’s in his beard and she dabs at it with her fingertips. “You should really shave this thing. I miss your chin.”

“Tell you what,” he says, tightening his grip on her slightly. “I’ll shave it off when something significant happens.”

“Like what?” she laughs.

He shrugs. “We’ll know when it happens.”

“What kind of significant are we talking? Like, a blowjob at the kitchen table significant or winning the lottery significant?”

“Well, I was thinking more along the lines of lottery, but I wouldn’t say no to a kitchen blowjob.”

She turns to the table and spears a snow pea on his fork. “You already kind of did.” She pops the pea in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “I still haven’t completely forgiven you for that whole thing, you know.”

She doesn’t specify but she doesn’t have to. “I know,” he says. He takes the fork from her and gets himself a piece of chicken. “See what I told you, though? If we were good people, that wouldn’t have happened to us.”

The Transfer Dance is not something they talk about and it’s not something Britta likes to think about. But she carries it with her, another piece of baggage on her luggage cart. Each time she makes a stupid decision she tries hard not to dwell on it but she usually does; she spent the entire summer thinking of what would have happened if she hadn’t done it. Maybe Jeff is right, maybe if she was a normal, good person, it wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have felt so unnecessarily competitive and she would have acted on her feelings for Jeff in a mature, appropriate way.

“We should take it back.”

“Uh, Jeff, I think we already did that. And it ended with you in the health center covered in urine.”

“No, not like that.” He grabs his beer off the table and takes a sip before handing it to her. “I mean we crash the dance and we make it ours.”

“What are we, twelve?” She downs rest of the beer. “No one would care if we went, so is that even crashing?”

His fingers dip beneath her waistband and brush along her hipbone. “If we go and mess everything up, rig the Transfer Queen vote, whatever, then it can’t hurt us anymore. It doesn’t matter because we win in the end.” His fingers move lower, play against the front of her panties, and she bites her lip.

She shifts a little to allow him better access. He leans his face in close, his breath mixing with hers, as he nudges her panties to the side and slides into her, one finger at a time. “Aren’t you tired of all this, Britta?” he asks lowly. “Tired of trying so hard and getting nowhere?”

“Yes,” she gasps. She wraps her arms around his neck and fists his shirt with her free hand. The empty beer bottle dangles in her other.

His fingers curl in and out of her and his thumb works at her clit. His mouth moves against her neck, tongue and lips and teeth, and she can feel him, growing hard against her.

“We’re bad people, you and me,” he says into her collarbone. “We’ve tried so hard to fake it but it’s caught up to us. We should just embrace it, don’t you think?”

She bucks her hips up to meet his hand and her stomach begins to clench and tighten because his words shouldn’t affect her so. She should get up and tell him to leave, that he’s being ridiculous, but she can’t because she knows it’s true. Her hand moves from his shirt into his hair, where she scratches at his scalp, digs her nails in hard enough to draw blood.

“We’re never going to be the heroes. Crash the dance with me. Be my partner in crime.”

Her muscles contract against his fingers and the bottle slips out of her hand and falls to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. She kisses him roughly, moaning into his mouth, their teeth clanking together. His blood is caked underneath her fingernails.

As she comes down from her orgasm their kisses slow until he pulls away, brings his fingers up to his mouth, and sucks them clean. “I think you owe me a kitchen blowjob now.”

She stands on shaky legs and starts to walk away. “Beard,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ll go to the dance, by the way. Clean this mess up.”

She steps on a few shards of glass on her way out of the kitchen and she can feel the blood start to pool beneath her skin. In the bathroom, she pulls the glass out of her feet and then stares into the mirror before she gets in the shower. Her cheeks are flushed and her hair’s a mess, but there’s something new behind her eyes. Or, something old. Something she’d hidden for years. Reflected back at her is her eleven year old self, scared and angry. She strips off her clothes and steps under the water and it’s as hot as it was the night of her eleventh birthday.

* * *

Britta’s glad she offered to drive because it gives her something to do while the car is filled only with noise from the radio. She keeps her eyes firmly on the road ahead of her but she can see Annie out of the corner of her eye, fidgeting and crossing and uncrossing her legs. They haven’t exchanged more than “how are you”s and they’re only a few blocks from the mall.

When Britta pulls into the parking lot, she turns the ignition off and gives Annie a hesitant smile. Annie returns it, her mouth stretching into a warm grin.

“Thanks for coming with me, Britta. I really miss you.”

They sift through racks of dresses and Annie fills Britta in on what’s been going on at Greendale, how she and Shirley are going to be co-valedictorians at graduation, how Abed and Troy are staying for another semester, how they’re all managing As in Cornwallis’s class. Britta feels like Greendale is a different world, like her days there were only a dream.

“So, what have you been up to?” Annie asks carefully. She holds a blue dress up for inspection and then shakes her head and puts it back.

“Just... trying to figure it all out, I guess,” Britta says with a shrug. “This would look nice on you.”

Annie takes the black dress and very obviously pretends to consider it. “It would look better on you, I think. How are things with, uh, you and Jeff?”

“Fine, I guess. We’re not, like, _together_ or anything.”

“Oh,” Annie says. “I’m going to try these on. Will you wait outside?”

“Sure.” Britta takes a seat on the floor outside of Annie’s dressing room and draws patterns in the carpet with her finger. She wonders what would happen if she told Annie she needed a dress, too. She’ll have to come back another day; she and Jeff decided not to tell anyone about their plans.

“So, um, when you say you and Jeff aren’t _together_ , what does that mean exactly?” Annie asks over the rustle of clothes. The door opens and she steps out in a pink dress that’s way too frumpy. Britta shakes her head and wrinkles her nose.

“It means that he’s always on my couch and we… sleep together.” Annie bites her lip a little and Britta sighs and her shoulders slump. “Look, we’ve never really talked about this, but I know you and Jeff... well, I don’t want to fight with you about boys anymore. I hope this whole thing doesn’t bother you but we’re both just going through some stuff right now. We’re not getting married or having babies or buying a house or whatever.”

Annie slides down so she’s sitting on the floor next to Britta. The ugly pink dress fans around her. “I’m not going to end up with Jeff,” she says. “And you know? I don’t really _want_ to. So I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t as much as it would have a year ago. And not enough for it to get in the way of our friendship.”

“Really?”

“Really! I’m leaving anyway, you know. I got into the master’s program at UC Colorado Springs and I’m going to get my Forensics degree and I’m going to start a life for myself.”

“That’s really great, Annie! Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” Annie says, smiling. Then her face turns serious. “What are you going to do now?”

Britta watches as a woman in her fifties locks herself in a dressing room, giving the two of them a strange look as she does. “I don’t know,” she mutters.

“What about being a therapist?”

“It’s not that easy anymore.” Britta doesn’t know if she can explain it to Annie, the thing inside of her that finds it all so restricting, the part of her that knows she’s not cut out for a life of helping others when she still hasn’t found a way to help herself. She thinks back to Jeff’s words and shivers a little bit, because they were all so true, and the worst part was that she _knew_ it, maybe all along. And maybe a part of her—the part of her who is petty and mean and cruel, the part of her she’s ashamed of—likes that she has this connection with someone, with Jeff, because it’s something that no one will take away from her, not even Annie. Especially not Annie.

“I don’t know how to act around you anymore,” Annie admits.

Britta pats her leg. “You know what, Annie? I don’t know how to act around me anymore either.”

* * *

That night, Jeff’s breathing is just starting to even out when Britta asks, “Do you think I could do it?”

“Do what?” he asks sleepily.

“Go back to school and become a therapist.”

“Of course I think you could do it. But I don’t think you’d be happy.”

“How did it go from being everything I ever wanted to something I know I wouldn’t be able to stand?”

He curls his fingers around her hip and tugs her a bit closer. “Because things always sound good until you have them.”

“Is that how you felt about me and you?” She’s glad her back is to him because this is a question she can only ask him when he can’t see her face. There aren’t too many of those anymore.

“Me and you, unsurprisingly, are the exception to the rule. We’re always better than we sound.”

She laughs a little. “It’s you, you know. You’re the one that makes me weird.”

“Mmm, sweetheart, you know just what to say,” he drawls. “Now go to sleep.”

His lips brush against her hair and she pushes back into his chest a little further, burrowing under his chin. She listens as his heartbeat slows and she feels a twisted sort of solace in not moving toward something for the first time in years, in moving backward instead, of knowing that—for now, at least—she isn’t alone in all of it.


	2. Part II

“Are you ready yet?” Jeff calls from the living room.

“Almost,” Britta lies. She stands in her bedroom in front of the full-length mirror in her underwear, dress in hand. Her hair lays curled on her shoulders and she’s wearing more makeup than she ever has in quite a long time. But somehow it feels right; it’s a mask but she’s not hiding behind it.

There’s a grocery bag on the kitchen table next to her clutch purse. Inside of it are three bottles of vodka and five hundred slips of paper with a single name written on them. In Britta’s purse are a wrench and two pocket knives. The purse is black, it matches the dress in her hands.

She takes a deep breath and steps into the dress. It’s tight and low and it’s the kind of dress women in movies wear when they’re about to kill a man. Britta feels powerful.

“Come zip me up!” she calls.

The mirror faces the door and she watches as he rounds into the room, grumbling about taking forever. But he stops in the doorway and Britta can’t fight the smirk on her face. “Well?” she prompts, gathering her hair to one side.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Britta,” he says lowly. “You can’t wear this.”

“Says who?”

“Says the janitor because he’s not going to want to spend his night wiping up the drool of every guy at Greendale. And I don’t want to have to watch them watching you.”

“Fuck you.”

He lays a hand on her hip and begins to tug the zipper up with the other. His fingers ghost along the skin of her back and her arms break out into goosebumps. “I certainly hope you will.” He brushes his lips against the base of her spine and she lets her hair back down.

“I have to put my shoes on,” she says as his mouth begins to work over her neck. “We have to go.”

He pulls away. “Sure, _now_ you want to leave,” he mutters.

Britta’s nervous in the car on the way to Greendale, but she tries her hardest not to show it. She crosses her legs and holds onto her purse so she doesn’t fidget. She and Jeff don’t say anything. It’s been a while since she’s been in the front seat of his car; they so rarely leave the apartment.

There’s a banner hanging on the outside of the cafeteria: _Transfer Dance 2013!_ Britta has an awful flashback to when the banner read 2010, to the dress she wore and later burned and the gentle pats on her arm from Shirley and Abed and Troy.

“You okay?” Jeff asks as he parks the car.

“Fine,” she lies.

“Okay.” He reaches over and squeezes her hand before getting out of the car.

They start at the back and make their way up the parking lot: Britta opens her purse and takes out the knives, hands one to Jeff and keeps one for herself. She takes off her heels and leaves them on the hood of the Lexus.

Jeff does the driver sides and Britta does the passenger sides. They work quietly and in unison, the sound of the tires deflating echoing as it mixes with the muffled music and laughter from the closed windows of the cafeteria.

Annie’s car is parked next to Shirley’s van and Britta hesitates. “We have to skip them.”

“I know,” Jeff says. “But then they’ll figure out it’s one of us.”

“So we skip the whole row,” Britta suggests. “It’s only a handful, and I can’t slash their tires.”

Jeff nods and they move to the next row and continue. Every once in a while the cafeteria door opens and someone will come outside to talk on the phone or smoke a cigarette. But no one tries to leave early, which had been a concern while planning.

When they make it back to the Lexus, Britta estimates they’ve done at least a hundred cars. She slips her shoes back on and stashes the knives in the glove compartment. “Here, move the car into the row we didn’t do.”

She waits outside while he parks a few spaces down from Annie and although it’s only May, the air is hot and stuffy and humid. It’s perfect weather for tonight, though; Britta couldn’t have planned it better if she tried.

He joins her and they creep around to the side of the building where the door to the boiler room is propped open with a bucket, just like Britta knew it would be. Her methodic surveying of the campus last year as they planned to infiltrate it has left her with a vast knowledge of what happens where and when.

Inside, Britta takes the wrench and a folded piece of paper out of her purse. “Okay, this is what we’re looking for.”

The thing about dating Troy Barnes is that he leaves everything he owns _everywhere_. It’s as if for each step he takes, three things fall out of his pockets. So after they broke up and Britta found enough of his stuff lying around her apartment to make a Troy Barnes museum, she put it all in a box and meant to bring it to him, but she was wary about the appropriate time window and then it seemed better to just forget about it and not mention the fact that they had ever dated at all.

Which led her to discover his discarded Air Conditioner Repair Manual: the complete guide to the Greendale Community College heating and cooling system. And how to dismantle it.

Jeff takes the paper from her and studies it for a minute. There’s a complicated diagram and Britta hopes Jeff understands it because she’s pretty lost.

He looks up and points to a control panel. “Here?”

Britta shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You’re the one who used to sleep with the Air Conditioning Messiah or whatever.”

“Yeah, because nothing says foreplay quite like discussing the air conditioner at our school.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t imagine Troy didn’t bore the shit out of you in bed.”

“Hey, my sex life with Troy is none of your business.”

“Actually, it is. How does it go? Everyone you’ve slept with I’ve slept with, too?”

“Really? Are you _still_ not over your whole jealousy thing? Troy and I broke up _months_ ago.”

“What jealousy thing? I was never _jealous_ of _Troy_.”

“Please! It was almost painfully obvious. Like, I was a little embarrassed for you.”

“Shut up!” Jeff smashes the wrench into the control panel. The glass shatters everywhere and the entire system makes a high-pitched hissing noise before shutting down completely.

The silence echoes as they stand frozen for a minute. “Oh- _kay_ ,” Britta says quietly. “I guess that works, too.”

Jeff scrubs a hand through his beard. “We should, uh, we should get going.” He places a possessive hand on the small of her back and she rolls her eyes but doesn’t shrug it off.

The boiler room leads to the kitchen, and they creep through and wait at the door to make sure no one’s there. Britta pushes the door open a crack, and the coast is clear, so they sneak in. Four large jugs of punch sit on the counter and she puts the plastic grocery bag down next to them.

“All right, Winger, let’s get pouring.”

They dump some of the punch into the sink and fill the empty spaces with vodka. When the bottles are empty, Britta pushes them to the bottom of the garbage can, rearranging empty chip bags and paper towels to hide them from sight. She washes her hands and when she turns around, Jeff holds out a jug of punch.

“You gotta take a swig.”

“What?” Britta wrinkles her nose. “No way, that stuff is all vodka.”

“Duh doy. You drink straight vodka all the time.”

“Not with _fruit punch_ , though. That’s gross.”

“One swig. I’ll do one, too.”

She eyes him warily and then takes the jug from him and downs a gulp. “ _Ugh_. Okay, your turn.”

His swig is much larger than hers, and she hopes he’s somehow learned to hold his vodka better because the night isn’t even close to being over.

“Okay, next step,” he says, screwing the lid back on the punch jug.

Dean Pelton, for all his twists and turns, is still somewhat predictable, because the Transfer Queen ballot box is sitting on a chair in the corner, as if the kitchen is the staging area for the entire dance. It’s a shoebox covered in construction paper and glitter with a slit in the top. Jeff lifts the lid and scoops out all the paper scraps, shoving them in Britta’s purse. Then he replaces them with the papers from the grocery bag and closes the box.

“Let’s go,” Britta says from her post by the door. They sneak back through the boiler room and outside, where Britta shakes the stolen ballots out of her purse and into the dumpster. Her heart starts racing as they approach the front doors and her steps become smaller and slower because her knees start to weaken. She shouldn’t have let Jeff talk her into what was basically a double shot of vodka.

Jeff must be able to sense it because she reaches for the door handle when he grabs her wrist and pulls her back.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“It’s okay. It’s not going to be like last time. Not at all.”

She exhales and leans into him a little. “I know.”

He twists to press a kiss to her mouth and then holds his arm out. “Ready?”

“Ready.” She hooks her arm through his and they walk inside, where what looks like all of Greendale is gathered, dancing and laughing.

The study group stands around a table in the corner and Annie spots them first. “Oh! Jeff and Britta!” she calls, waving.

Annie throws her arms around Britta when she and Jeff make it to the table. “I can’t believe you guys are here!”

“Yeah, well, we figured we’d stop by,” Jeff says as he hugs Shirley.

Annie lets go of Britta and Britta turns around to find herself face-to-face with Troy. His eyes widen as he sees her dress and she can feel Jeff’s gaze, heavy behind her.

“Hey, Troy,” she says, reaching out to hug him. His arms come around her, dipping a little too low on her waist. Over his shoulder, Abed shoots her a look and she shakes her head slightly.

“You look nice,” Troy chokes out thickly.

“Thank you,” she says as she pulls away. He’s staring at her chest and Jeff is staring at Troy and Abed is staring at Jeff.

“Hi, pumpkin!” Shirley says loudly and pointedly, gathering Britta in her arms. “Come dance with me!”

Britta allows herself to be pulled onto the dance floor, Annie following behind. The three guys stand awkwardly to the side.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?” Annie asks at the same time Shirley says, “Britta, what _are_ you doing?”

“We wanted to surprise you,” Britta says with a shrug. “And I’m not _doing_ anything, Shirley.”

“I saw the way Jeff was looking at Troy,” Shirley says lowly. “Don’t play with those boys’ hearts.”

Britta rolls her eyes. “You’re exaggerating. Besides, me and Jeff aren’t even together. And I don’t even _have_ feelings for Troy anymore.”

The air is starting to feel thick; the room is packed and the windows only open a crack. Britta can see sweat bead on Shirley’s upper lip and along Annie’s hairline. She tosses her hair over one shoulder to give her neck some relief.

“We’re worried about you, Britta,” Shirley says. Her voice is kind, concerned. “Why don’t you come back to school? You can enroll in summer classes and we’ll help you any way you can.”

Annie nods enthusiastically and Britta gives them a sad smile. “I appreciate it, guys, I do but it’s not going to work that way.”

“But _why_?” Annie asks. She wipes her brow and exhales a little. The temperature climbs.

Britta opens her mouth to respond with the truth: she doesn’t know, she’ll never know, they’ll never know. But she feels someone standing behind her and somehow she knows it’s Jeff.

“Can I cut in?” he asks, all charm and politeness.

The three of them haven’t even been dancing, just sort of parked on the dance floor, but Shirley gives him a resigned nod and leads Annie back to Troy and Abed.

“Starting to get pretty warm in here,” he says with a smirk.

“How long before Dean Pelton sends Troy to go check it out?”

“Ten, twenty minutes.” He tugs on her hand. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

“But we’ll miss the crowning of the queen,” Britta says, confused.

They make their way to the back of the cafeteria, his hand still gripping hers. Troy and Annie are watching intently. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll hear the uproar when they call Leonard’s name.”

The hallways are dim and quiet and Britta’s heels echo. “Shirley accused me of playing with yours and Troy’s heart,” Britta says. “I wanted to tell her you don’t even have one.”

“Funny,” he says. “But trust me, kitten, it wasn’t his heart you were playing with.”

Britta stops short when she realizes they’re in the library. “What are we doing here?”

He pulls a key from his pocket and unlocks the door to the study room. “See, there’s something called parallelism. Or, as Abed would say, a callback.”

“Where did you even get that key?”

“I know a guy,” he says slyly. He shrugs off his jacket, folds it, and places it on the table. “I got you a pillow this time, though.”

“You want to have sex on the table?”

He clucks his tongue. “Britta. I have thought of nothing except having sex with you since before we left the house.” He pulls her in close and kisses her, walking them back against the table. He lifts her up and sets her on top, settling between her legs.

Her fingers work quickly on his shirt buttons and she remembers the first time this happened. And at the first Transfer Dance, how she thought maybe they’d be able to sneak away and fool around. She’d been so stupid before but now the whole school will be drunk on vodka and those girls lined up hoping to be Transfer Queen will be disappointed and everyone’s makeup will melt and hair will frizz and they won’t even be able to get home without calling AAA.

And _she_ did that. Jeff was right, because she kind of does feel like she won somehow. She won’t be burning this dress later, she thinks as Jeff unzips her.

They had sex in the study room only once after paintball. It was on the couch in the back of the room, one Friday afternoon after the rest of the group went home for the weekend. Usually, the seven of them had lunch together on Fridays but it was starting to snow and the forecast predicted six inches by dark so they all left. And Jeff looked at Britta and they lingered and her shirt was pushed up to her collarbone and her pants dangled from one ankle. They drew the blinds and closed the doors and never made any mention of the table.

Because it’s significant, somehow, isn’t it? Britta asks herself as she lays back, her head on Jeff’s jacket, him climbing over her, fishing a condom out of his pocket. The table is where they first convinced themselves that they could sleep together and it be only tension relieving, instead of this mess of tangles and wires and the idea that no matter what, it’s always going to be the two of them. They’re too entwined now, and she loves him in a way that’s not the same as it used to be. She’s not _in_ love with him but he slides inside her and her hips rise to greet him and he is her constant, the one person who will look at her and see all the awful things she keeps inside and will shrug and not care because he has them, too. It’s a resigned love and she knows she will never love anyone else in this way again because there _is_ no one else like him. It’s not a love she wants to shout from the rooftops but to keep quietly to herself, to let it sit in the cupboard, there in case she ever needs it.

After, he kisses the sweat from her forehead and pulls her close. The room is dark save for the emergency lights and she makes a decision.

“You were right, you know.”

“About what?”

“There is something. That happened.”

“Oh?”

She stares up at the ceiling, the table beneath her slick with her sweat, and it was always going to happen here, of all places.

“It was my birthday and I had a party at one of those restaurants with arcade games and pizza and where people are dressed up in animal costumes and they dance and sing songs. And almost every kid from my class was there, even this boy I had the _biggest_ crush on, and he said I looked pretty in my dress. It was the best party but as we were getting ready to leave, I realized I left my sweater in the back room where everyone hung their coats. So I went back and there was this man in there and he was one of the characters, he was a dinosaur. And he...”

His hand clenches into a fist at her side and she feels him inhale to say something but she shakes her head.

“I went straight to the manager’s office and I told him everything. My dad came in because he was looking for me and the manager told him what I said and neither of them believed me. They thought I was making it up because I was upset the party was over. But it happened.”

“How old were you?” Jeff asks, his voice hoarse.

“Eleven.”

“But your Halloween costume—”

“It’s something I do every few years to try and convince myself that he hasn’t won. Because in seventh grade, we learned about dinosaurs in science class and I actually threw up all over my desk. It wasn’t pretty.”

“I,” he starts.

“No,” she interrupts. “I didn’t tell you so you could pity me. This is just something you need to know. It’s leveling the playing field. We’re even now. Restoring the balance, remember?”

“I remember.” His fingers curl around her hip and she sinks into him a little, into the table, feels her bones and her muscles because she’s still there, she survived it all.

“And that’s the thing that made me a bad person,” she says. “Because after that I was different.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” he asks. “How one thing that happened so long ago can have such an effect?”

She nods and closes her eyes. There’s a loud eruption of noise coming from the cafeteria and a grin breaks over her face. “Looks like Leonard just won Transfer Queen.”

* * *

The high of their Transfer Dance victory lasts a while. And Britta is relieved when Jeff doesn’t treat her any differently now that he finally knows everything about her. She had been very careful, after Thanksgiving, to jump right back into the banter and the teasing and to fight off the urge she had to cry or hug him every time she saw him. But Jeff is still Jeff, although maybe a bit more tender: she wakes in the middle of the night to find him rearranging the blankets over her, he brings her cups of green tea while she watches the six o’clock news, he sometimes kisses her like she’s made of glass.

But after two weeks it all starts getting old and gloating over tweets and Facebook statuses of people trapped at Greendale because their tires had been slashed only keeps them occupied for so long. Britta starts feeling restless and trapped inside the apartment. She takes up knitting again and makes scarves and socks and mittens, even as May turns into June and the windows are wide open to let the smell of summer inside.

“I hope you don’t expect me to wear this anytime soon,” Jeff says, lifting the finished half of the scarf she’s working on. “Because it’s hot enough in here as it is.”

She slaps his hand away. “Don’t! And I’ll just put them away for winter. It’s something to do.”

“I am pretty bored,” he agrees. He places a hand on her thigh and it starts inching its way upward but she shifts her legs.

“Not right now. We have to talk about something.”

He gives her a hard look. “What?”

“Jeff, I don’t have any money. I can pay July’s rent but that’s it. And you’re paying rent on a place you haven’t been to in at least three weeks. So I was thinking...”

“You want me to move in with you?”

She squirms, uncomfortable, and keeps her eyes on the knitting needles. “I mean, you’ve been here since April. And you eat all my food and use up my hot water anyway.”

“I think you’re overestimating the amount of money _I_ have.”

“You don’t have a fancy lawyer savings account?”

“What do you think I’ve been living on for the last four years? Well’s almost dried up, kitten.”

She puts her knitting project on the coffee table and turns so she’s sitting with her back against the arm of the couch. “Okay. So we need to get off our asses and get jobs. That should be easier for you, FYI, because you actually have a college degree.”

“Yeah, in _education_. The only thing I can do with that is, like, be a _teacher_.”

Britta can’t help but laugh. “Don’t even think about it. Those poor children.”

He rolls his eyes. “Hilarious.”

“Maybe I could go to the Greasy Fork and beg for my old job back,” she says thoughtfully. “Or I could sell one of my eggs to a gay couple.”

“You’re kidding me, right? Is that even safe?”

She shrugs. “You get like ten grand for one egg. What the hell am I going to do with them?”

He holds up his hand in a stopping motion. “Don’t put all your eggs in someone else’s basket just yet, Fertile Myrtle.”

“Do you have any suggestions then?”

He’s quiet for a minute and Britta stares at him expectantly. Then he looks up and his face is perfectly blank. “We steal it.”

She isn’t sure if he’s joking or not so she doesn’t answer.

“We rob a bank, get like, half a mil, and we’re fine until we figure something else out.”

“We’re just going to rob a bank? Just like that?”

“You’re telling me you’ve never stolen anything before?”

She looks at him incredulously. “Well, yeah, but taking jeans from a Deb is a lot different than _robbing a bank_.”

“No, listen.” He places a hand on her arm. “You and me, we can do this. The Greendale County Credit Union. There’s little to no security there _and_ do you know who works there as a teller?”

Inhaling, Britta shakes her head.

“Misti. Or Valerie. Or whatever her name is. The stripper that Andre cheated on Shirley with. It could be like, retribution for that time I got her out of going to jail and she slept with Andre.”

“Be quiet for like thirty seconds,” Britta says. “I need to think about what you’re saying.”

He shuts up and she closes her eyes and imagines it. In Britta’s favorite episode of _The Powerpuff Girls_ , a villain named Femme Fatale robs banks but only steals Susan B. Anthony coins because she doesn’t want to acknowledge currency with men’s faces on it. In the end, the girls learn a lesson about gender equality, but Britta was pretty much in awe of how cool the entire idea behind Femme Fatale was. And, okay, it turns out Femme Fatale didn’t _actually_ know who Susan B. Anthony was—and Britta, contrary to popular belief, knows a lot about Susan B. Anthony—but still: a blonde, female supervillain who basically wanted to take down the patriarchy? Sign Britta up.

Okay, so there’s not exactly a patriarchy to dismantle at the Greendale Credit Union. So it’s not exactly the same situation. But say she and Jeff rob a bank. Say they dress up in black clothes and ski masks and fill bags with money, bundled up neatly with those little bands. Say they’re able to pay the rent and maybe get an air conditioner for the window and eat dinner somewhere that isn’t the sketchy Chinese place up the street. Say this is the next step in all of it, after pulling what were essentially pranks at a school dance. Say this is what bad people do.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Let’s do it.”

They fuck on the couch to celebrate this new plan and Britta straddles him, looks down on him for a change, feels more in control of her life than she has in a long time. She’ll be okay, they both will, because with money comes options and with options comes power. His fingers dig bruises into her hipbones and she relishes in it, admires them in the bathroom mirror the next morning.

* * *

A year ago Britta and Jeff did good, heroic things, like rescue a man kidnapped by an evil wanna-be dictator. Britta wonders if Greendale actually is an asylum, deluding her into thinking she was whole and healthy and meant for better things. She remembers Shirley’s wedding, when she was so scared her life was going to end up being _Leave it to Beaver_ and she would have to pin her hair and wear an apron and learn how to work a carpet steamer. Raise a couple kids and have dinner hot on the table at six-thirty sharp. It was a stupid, drunken, waking nightmare but the next morning as she nursed her hangover with a bloody Mary and five aspirin, she had that bachelor’s degree to fall back on. If she could earn her own way, she wouldn’t _have_ to depend on a man for anything.

Or, if she could steal her own way, she wouldn’t have to either.

She and Jeff spend their days plotting; there’s no use going into this half-assed. Britta opens up a checking account at the credit union so she can get a scope of the place. They map every route, discuss how far they have to drive to throw off any trail before they loop back around and come home. They figure out parking spots, where to park Britta’s car, where to park the getaway Lexus. They talk clothes and hair and shoes and bags. They watch bank heist movies and analyze the realism behind them.

Britta goes out for groceries one day and stops at the mall on her way home. She buys a wig, bright purple and curly, and pays with cash.

“What’s this?” Jeff asks as he paws through the bags.

“I thought, uh, I would wear it. You know. As like, a disguise.”

“A disguise that makes you look exactly like _you_ but from five years ago?”

She shrugs, fighting her embarrassment, and pulls her hair back before fitting the wig over her head. “It’s different. No pink streaks and thankfully I outgrew that awful nose ring.”

He looks at her appraisingly. “Anyone see you buy this?”

“One salesgirl. A teenager and she barely looked at my face. No security cameras. Didn’t use a card.”

“Okay,” he says. He pulls an apple out of one of the bags and takes a bite. “One more thing. Think we should get guns? Not to use them, but for show?”

His voice is all forced nonchalance and she’s pretty sure he’s only eating the apple for something to do, to distract her—and maybe himself—from his discomfort. So Britta rescues him: “What about those prop guns? The ones you and Annie used with the Dean?”

He exhales and swallows a mouthful of apple. “Good idea. I know where they’re kept. I can grab them tomorrow. I don’t think there are many drama classes going on in the summer. Other than that... I think, I think we’re ready. Do you feel ready?”

She smiles. “I feel ready.”

So they circle a date on the calendar and it’s early July and when they wake up that morning Britta’s hands are shaking but she makes coffee and Jeff scrambles eggs and they eat in silence. After breakfast they fuck against the kitchen counter, all nervous energy, and Jeff whispers in her ear over and over that it’ll be okay. She believes him because she has no other choice and she doesn’t think about what will happen if they get caught.

They both dress in all black because that’s how people do it in the movies and it’s stupid, really; Britta feels like kind of an idiot in the wig and black jeans and long-sleeved black t-shirt. They’re both wearing black sneakers, Britta’s scuffed more than Jeff’s, ski masks inside the duffel bag in the backseat. They take Britta’s car because it’s a lot older than Jeff’s: it doesn’t have an alarm or working power locks, a perfect target for thieves. She drives with both hands gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turn white. Jeff keeps a hand on her thigh and she feels it steadying her, rooting her into the seat.

She parks the car around the corner and down an alley from the bank and calls the police, reports her car stolen, and they move. It’s an out-of-body experience, an adrenaline rush, a dream. The prop guns look so real and Misti/Valerie keeps her composure but Britta can see the sweat beading along her forehead and her upper lip. She’s the only teller there, holding down the fort while everyone else goes out for lunch. Jeff sticks a prop gun in her face and she piles it all in, thousands of dollars, an entire duffel bag full of hundreds and fifties and even twenties and tens. Britta thinks her heart is going to explode out of her chest it’s beating so fast and surely she must be having a heart attack as Misti/Valerie zips the duffel bag closed and slides it over the counter.

“Now leave,” she says firmly.

Jeff says something then but Britta can’t hear because there’s a buzzing in her ears, white noise, and maybe it’s something like counting to one hundred before calling the police and then he’s grabbing her hand and as soon as their backs are turned to the bank he pulls both their masks off and slips the guns in the front pocket of the bag. They slink down the street, to the municipal parking lot where they parked the Lexus last night, and Jeff drives home.

“I panicked,” she says quietly when they’re halfway there.

“No, you did great,” he assures.

“How did you stay so calm?”

“I... don’t know,” he says slowly, like he isn’t sure of the answer.

She turns to the window and watches Greendale pass by. She can hear the sirens already, wailing as they hurry toward the bank, to interrogate Misti/Valerie, to check for security cameras that aren’t there, to look for clues they’ll never find. Britta says a mental thank you for the shittiness of Greendale as a county and the fact that their banks don’t even have the necessary precautions against thieves. She’s sure they will now, though. The wig is in her lap and she brushes stray hairs back into place with her fingers. “I’ll do better next time,” she says.

They get home and spread it out over the kitchen table, all $545,350. It’s more money than Britta’s ever had her entire life probably combined and she tries to think of it in terms of months of rent, of leather jackets, of Radiohead tickets, of cars, of houses. She thinks of all the things she can buy and it’s overwhelming, all this money, all these options.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” she says. “We hide like, three hundred grand. Stash it in the mattress, in the floorboards, in cereal boxes, anywhere. And we forget about it. Take the rest, pay the bills, and live off of it. Carefully.”

She knows exactly how quickly they can burn through this money, and she knows that they _can’t_.

The next morning Britta wakes up alone and she panics for a few stupid seconds—what if he left with the money, decided he doesn’t need her anymore, went to find what else is out there besides her?—before she hears water running in the bathroom. It’s been months since Jeff has woken up before her; long gone are the days he would roll out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready for a run. He still does sit-ups and push-ups sometimes, to keep himself in shape, but most days he doesn’t leave the couch.

The water turns off and the bathroom door creaks open. “Jeff?” she calls.

“Close your eyes! I have a surprise for you!”

She scoffs but complies and she hears his footsteps on the floor. The bed sinks and he’s next to her. He takes her hands and places them somewhere on his body, smooth, soft skin, and her eyes fly open because it’s his face, free from the awful mountain-man beard.

“Oh!” She kisses him everywhere she can reach, skin that’s been hidden from her for months and months and his jaw and his chin and it doesn’t scratch against her anymore.

“Something significant,” she laughs into his mouth and he’s laughing, too, lighter and freer than she’s seen him in so long and suddenly she is happy.


	3. Part III

This high lasts longer than the previous one, feels deeper. Britta cleans the entire apartment from top to bottom and makes Jeff reach the high spots and move the couch so she can vacuum underneath. She throws out old clothes and replaces them with new, nice things. She opens all the windows and lets summer in, mixes fun cocktails at dinner with ingredients like coconut rum and pineapple juice. She spends a day with Annie at the public pool, laying on beach towels and flipping through trashy gossip rags, listening contently as Annie prattles on about her upcoming move to Colorado Springs, grateful not to have to contribute anything about her own life.

She takes a chunk of money and invites Annie and Shirley out for a spa day, pays for everything, even the chocolate bath and the seaweed wrap and the pedicures, despite her personal stances on each. (Although, and maybe she won’t admit this out loud but, throwing a bunch of money away so underpaid workers can pamper the shit out of you really is all it’s cracked up to be.)

Jeff treats Troy and Abed to the movies, tagging along for midnight openings of every summer blockbuster. He comes home exhausted and complaining of stomach aches from too much popcorn and candy and Britta perches on the couch with her new pedicure and her muscles all relaxed and humming nicely from her massages and laughs at him. But a few weeks later Britta gets sunburnt pretty bad and suffers through Jeff’s taunts as he rubs aloe into her skin.

The one thing she can’t get over is how _easy_ the whole thing was. The police called that evening and said they found her car abandoned with no damage near the bank and assume whoever stole it also robbed the bank. They let Britta pick it up the next day after not finding any fingerprints—“The perps must have been wearing gloves,” they tell her as she nods interestedly with wide, grateful eyes—and there’s an article about the whole thing in the newspaper saying they have no leads. So she and Jeff sit on a pile of money, half of it hidden throughout the apartment, and they pay their bills and nothing happens.

One day Britta and Jeff are at the mall and they exchange a glance and that’s that, a pair of sneakers ends up in Britta’s purse. And no one gives them any trouble, probably because they’re unassuming white people, and they leave the mall with a bunch of new things they didn’t pay a dime for.

It’s a new way to keep that adrenaline rush going and soon they’re stealing from every store in the tri-county area. They learn about security cameras and alarm systems and how to dismantle ink tags without making them erupt or ripping the clothes. They stop dressing like bums without jobs and start dressing like... well, like they used to dress, only Britta slightly better with non-homemade shorts and nice tops and expensive, skimpy bathing suits.

And it’s not like at the bank, when her brain fogged up and she wasn’t aware of what was going on. Now everything is sharp and precise and Britta knows exactly what she’s doing. And it feels good, feels right, feels natural. Each time they make it past a barrier Britta feels a lightening in her chest and she knows Jeff feels it, too, because they’re all over each other in the car, hands everywhere, and whoever drives home drives with the gas pedal on the floor.  It’s a lightening that somehow goes hand in hand with the darkness Britta feels settle into her bones. _This_ is who she is.

They try not to flaunt the money, though, try not to buy their friends too many things. When Annie puts down a shirt at the mall claiming it’s too expensive, Britta hums in agreement instead of offering to get it for her or shrugging at the price.

It’s late August when Abed calls and says he and Troy are throwing a going-away dinner party for Annie. “It’s really important that you and Jeff are here,” he tells Britta. “Also we’re putting you in charge of the beverages.”

When they show up at Troy/Abed/Annie’s apartment, arms laden with bottles of soda and wine, Shirley looks solemn and Annie wrings her hands nervously and Troy looks like he’s going to cry. Abed takes the drinks from Britta and makes a big show of arranging them neatly on the kitchen counter.

“Jeez,” Jeff says. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing!” Shirley says, too much forced brightness to be convincing. “Let’s eat, okay? I made roast chicken and a nice salad and vegetables and mashed potatoes.”

“I love mashed potatoes!” Troy exclaims in a weird voice.

Annie shoots him a look and then smiles sweetly at Britta. “Thanks for bringing the drinks.”

“No problem,” Britta answers uneasily.

They sit down to eat and after a few minutes of passing dishes around and filling wine glasses it all evens out and conversation eases. Whatever was bothering everyone before she and Jeff got there seems to have gone away, for which Britta is glad. She misses her friends, sitting with them each day in the study room. They sit around the table in the same formation as they used to in the study room, whether consciously or not, and for a second she imagines going back, but then remembers it would just be her, Troy, and Abed; Shirley and Annie have graduated. Three bachelor’s degrees in the room, and two more on the way. She’s the furthest from earning one.

After dinner, Shirley passes around her cell phone so everyone can coo over pictures of Ben, who is suddenly two years old and unrecognizable from the baby Britta delivered in a Greendale classroom. Jeff gives her a look she can’t define as she smiles at the pictures and passes the phone to her right, to Abed.

“What?” she asks quietly.

He shakes his head and takes another sip of wine. She shrugs and turns back to her plate of strawberry pie but catches Annie watching the two of them curiously.

Britta volunteers to help Shirley and Troy with the dishes as Jeff, Annie, and Abed clear and wipe down the table. Shirley washes and Britta dries and Troy puts away, still looking anxious, plates almost slipping from his grasp.

“So how are you doing, Britta?” Shirley asks quietly, her voice mostly muffled by the running water.

“I’m okay,” Britta says. “Why is everyone acting so weird?”

Shirley scrubs harder, pointedly not meeting Britta’s eyes. “It’s just a little strange, you know, with Annie leaving.” It’s a lie and Britta knows it, but she decides not to press the issue.

“You’re okay, though? Everything’s fine?” Shirley asks again. “Okay with you and Jeff?”

Troy begins whistling and Britta can’t help but roll her eyes at him before turning back to Shirley. “It’s good. Me and Jeff are good. We’re not together, like I told you before. We’re just... we’re friends.”

“Friends who live together and sleep together,” Shirley says.

Britta shrugs. “Yeah. But it works for us.”

“As long as you know what you’re doing.” Shirley passes her a pan. “I worry about you sometimes, Britta. We all do.”

Troy places a hand on her arm and nods. “We want you to be happy.”

Britta smiles and grasps his hand, squeezing gently. It feels familiar but off somehow, as if his hand is the same but hers has changed. She misses him, but the way things used to be before she thought dating him would be a good idea. And it wasn’t, it was kind of a terrible idea, because neither of them wanted it bad enough. But despite the fact that their breakup was mostly amicable and they told each other it wouldn’t be weird, it was, because of course it was, it’s never _not_ weird. So she feels like she lost a friend, and when you lose Troy you lose Abed and her relationship with Shirley and Annie—despite spending time with them this summer—is strained and Pierce is off with Gilbert at some beach-front property living his life the way Britta should be living hers and all she has is Jeff. It’s like the two of them are on an island and they used to live in a bustling city but their friends are still there and they left and someone knocked down the bridge they used to take to get back and forth so now they can never get back.

“I’m fine, really,” she says. “I appreciate you guys worrying about me. I do. But everything’s good.”

She pulls her hand from Troy’s and goes back to drying. She wants, for a moment, to tell them everything but she’s not sure how to articulate the fact that these are good things that are happening, not bad, and they don’t make her not okay but happy, so deliriously happy and whole. So she stays quiet and the three of them work in silence.

She dares a glance to Jeff, who is listening to Abed and Annie talk but looks uncomfortable. She guesses he’s getting the same concerned third-degree that she just got, because he keeps shifting in his seat. He turns and catches her eyes and gives her the same look he gave her after dinner. She’s still not sure what it means so she smiles and breaks his gaze.

After the dishes are done and the kitchen is probably cleaner than it’s been since the day Troy and Abed moved in, Annie asks if they can all sit back down at the table. Britta thinks she’s about to give a sappy speech about moving away. There’s a going-away gift in Britta’s purse, a necklace she stole from a department store last week.

When they’re seated, fresh glasses of wine or soda in front of them, Annie stands up nervously and clears her throat. “Okay. Basically, for the last few months we’ve all—”

“This is an intervention!” Troy blurts out loudly, then claps his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”

Annie glares at him. “ _Troy_.”

“An intervention?” Jeff asks. “For who?”

Annie looks helplessly around the room. “Um, well—”

“For you and Britta,” Abed interrupts. “We think you’re going down a slippery slope.”

“What?” Britta’s heart sputters and she tries really hard not to turn to look at Jeff, as if that will give it all away. “What are you even talking about?”

“Jeff, you graduated almost a year ago. Are you even looking for jobs anymore?” Shirley asks. “Britta, you dropped out just shy of graduating. And the two of you aren’t even doing anything with your lives. It’s not healthy.”

“Shirley, we’re perfectly healthy,” Jeff says.

“How are you paying your bills?” Annie asks. “Britta, how did you afford that spa day? You’re wearing a new skirt. How did you pay for it?”

“You paid for all our movie tickets, Jeff,” Abed adds. “And we always get the jumbo bottomless popcorn. That’s expensive.”

Britta feels like she’s going to throw up. She takes a few quick, deep breaths. “Since when are you guys in charge of our finances? And I told you, I got that spa package as a gift.”

“Some weird things happened at the Transfer Dance,” Troy says. “You two came, stayed for five minutes, and then disappeared. And the AC broke and everyone’s tires were slashed and everyone got drunk.”

“And Leonard won Transfer Queen!” Annie exclaims.

“We stopped by to see you guys!” Britta says. “Shirley and Annie, it was your final Greendale event!”

“Where did you guys go if you weren’t the ones spiking the punch?” Abed asks.

“We were fucking in the study room, is that what you want to hear?” Jeff yells and the room goes silent.

Troy and Annie exchange uncomfortable looks and Britta sighs. “Look, guys. I know things have been weird since we’re not all at Greendale anymore. But Jeff and I are fine. We are. And we’re all still friends and we love each other and that’s what matters, right?”

“Did you guys rob the bank?” Annie asks quietly.

Britta digs her nails into her palm so hard it breaks the skin and she can feel the blood pool. “What?”

“The credit union,” Shirley says. “You said they found your car in the alley next to it.”

“Yeah, because my car was _stolen_. I called the police that day,” Britta says, trying to keep her voice even.

“There was no evidence at all as to who did it. But they did find a single purple hair. Synthetic,” Abed says.

“Neither of us has purple hair,” Jeff says.

“Britta used to,” Troy says in a small voice.

There’s another pause.

“The two of you,” Shirley starts slowly, “have always had your own thing going on. You say you’re just friends, and what you do is your business. But this love you have for each other is toxic and if you continue to cling to each other like you are, it’s going to destroy you both. We love you and we don’t want that for you.”

Abed, Annie, and Troy look at the table, pointedly not meeting anyone’s eyes. Shirley, however, is looking right at them, across the table, and Britta’s never understood it when people or books say that one look can go right through your bones until now.

“I think we should go,” Jeff says. He stands up and Britta follows suit. She feels like she should say something but she doesn’t; just grabs her purse off the floor and they leave, closing the door behind them.

* * *

When they get back home, Britta kicks off her shoes and flops face-down onto the couch. Jeff sinks to the floor, his back pressed against the couch, his head thrown back to rest on Britta’s ankles.

“So, _that_ happened,” he says.

“I don’t even know what to think right now,” she mutters into a pillow. “They just flat-out think we robbed the bank.”

“To be fair,” Jeff says, “we totally did.”

She kicks him. “Duh doy. But still. I would never accuse any of them of robbing a bank.”

“We did a good job of covering.”

“I think so.”

She closes her eyes and suddenly she’s really tired. She can’t stop picturing Shirley’s face, disappointed and concerned.

“Do you think Shirley was right?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I did plenty of bad things before I ever met you.”

“Me, too.”

“Is it possible for two people to bring out the best and the worst in each other at the same time?”

“Maybe. I think that’s how we are.”

He’s quiet and then: “Hey. I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I’m not... I’m not in love with you.”

She waits: waits for her bones to turn to jelly before hardening in anger, waits for her heart to break, waits for the urge to run. But it never comes. She doesn’t feel _anything_ , really, because she knows he didn’t say it to hurt her.

“I’m not in love with you, either.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “You’re my best friend and you’re the one I want to be with. But I don’t think I _can_ be in love with someone. Anyone.”

“Okay. I don’t want anything you can’t give me.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. This. What we already have.”

“When you put the word _love_ on it everything gets ruined.”

“So don’t.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“I’m fine.”

It’s the truth, because she understands everything he’s not saying. There’s something inside her—maybe the part he saw from the start that makes her off somehow—that lets her know she too might never be able to love someone in the full, irrevocable way you’re supposed to love someone. Even if that someone is Jeff.

She turns over so she’s on her back and nudges him with her foot. “Come up here.”

“We both can’t fit. Your couch is too small.”

“You’re just too big.” She sits up and makes room for him, waits for him to stretch out as much as he can before crawling over him. She closes her eyes and listens to his heart, lets it serve as the rhythm to her worries about her friends. Annie’s moving in a week, only an hour away, but Britta wonders how long it’ll be before it’s out of sight, out of mind. They haven’t heard from Pierce in months.

“We’ll call them tomorrow,” Jeff says, as if he can hear her thoughts. “We can apologize, thank them for being worried about us. Give Annie that gift you got her.”

“It’ll be fine, right?”

He sweeps her hair off her neck and runs his fingers over her skin. She shivers a little and burrows further into him, the buttons of his shirt imprinting themselves into her cheek. “You know how they are. They’re mad for like a day and then it’s like it never happened.”

She nods.

“For what it’s worth,” he says. “I don’t think you’re toxic. I don’t think _we’re_ toxic. And I don’t think we’re going to destroy each other.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I have an idea. But I don’t want to talk about it until I have it fully-formed. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” she says around a yawn. “That’s okay.” She wonders what it is, if it’s in the same vein as the bank robbery, of stealing everything in sight. But she doesn’t push because that’s not what they do anymore. It’s a give and take, somehow simultaneously more and less healthy than they’ve ever been.


	4. Part IV

Jeff goes back to his laptop and Britta thinks he’s on Netflix again, maybe going for a different cartoon series he’s too old to have watched while it was airing. But every time she tries to peek he quickly minimizes the window he’s working in so all she sees is the picture of her cat she made the desktop wallpaper. He spends _hours_ on the computer, morning and night, and Britta gets used to seeing him with a bluish glare on his face, hunched over and fingers scrolling over the touch pad.

Britta takes Annie out to lunch the day before she’s set to leave for Colorado Springs. It’s an awkward, stunted afternoon of picking at salads and Britta drinks so much water to keep her mouth occupied that she’s probably going to end up in the bathroom twice before the meal is over.

“About what Shirley said,” Annie starts, her eyes firmly on her plate. “She wasn’t saying it to be mean.”

“I know,” Britta says. “But I’m not talking about this anymore. I don’t want to have to defend myself to you guys. I’m a big girl.”

Annie curls into herself a little bit and Britta sighs.

“Here.” She reaches into her purse and pulls out the box with the necklace in it. “I got you a going-away gift.”

With hesitant fingers, Annie takes the box from her and opens it slowly. Her face clouds over and she snaps it closed and sets it on the table. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

Her tone is cold and clipped and Britta leans back in her chair a little and crosses her arms over her chest. “Not gonna ask me how I paid for it?”

Annie looks up from her salad and shrugs. “You wouldn’t tell me anyway.”

Every fight Britta has ever had with Annie has been vicious for ten minutes and then chilly for another ten and then done by the half-hour mark. But that was before and Britta’s a different person now. And maybe that’s a good thing or maybe that’s a bad thing but it means that Britta opens her mouth instead of clamping it shut and biting her tongue until it bleeds.

“I don’t know what everyone’s so mad about,” she says. “You all did nothing but ridicule me for two years about being a therapist. Well, it’s done. I dropped out. I’m not going to be a therapist. Shouldn’t you all be happy?”

“What?” Annie squeaks. “Britta, you’re our _friend_. We never wanted you to drop out of school!”

“You switched your major and I supported you! I’m the one who gave Troy that yoga book so he’d have something to do during Air Conditioner Repair classes! I pulled so many all-nighters with you and Shirley helping the two of you study! I _paid_ for Abed’s film classes! And none of you could give me the time of day when it came to my major so don’t you all sit there and act like you believed in me. Because you didn’t.”

Annie doesn’t say anything, just exhales slowly and tucks her hair behind her ear. Her salad is half-eaten, divided into four neat little piles with equal space between them, two intersecting lines forming quadrants like graphs Britta used to make in math class.

“I still think you’re making a mistake. Jeff, too. You two are destructive,” she finally says.

“You’re jealous because I’m with Jeff again and you’re not,” Britta blurts out before she can stop herself. It’s a mean, nasty thing to say, and she immediately regrets it because Annie’s face flushes red and her jaw drops a little and she throws her napkin on the table.

“I have to go.” She gathers her purse and shoves the jewelry box unceremoniously inside. She leaves without a word and without looking back and Britta has an apology on the tip of her tongue ready to go but it doesn’t make it past her mouth. She watches through the window as Annie storms through the parking lot and gets in her car. It’s a few minutes before she drives away and Britta wonders if she calls Shirley or Troy or Abed to tell them what happened. Maybe she calls Jeff, tells him stories of how awful Britta is. What Annie doesn’t realize, though, is that Jeff knows that better than anyone.

Britta finishes her lunch alone. The waiter comes by and asks her if everything’s okay and she smiles politely and says yes, her friend had to leave unexpectedly. The waiter obviously doesn’t buy it, but returns her smile anyway and leaves her alone until he brings the check. Britta pays for the whole thing, even Annie’s perfect geometrically divided salad and unsweetened iced tea with exactly one and a half packets of Splenda. She leaves a nice tip.

But she’s not ready to go back home and explain everything to Jeff, so she drives around a little bit. She passes the credit union and there’s still a piece of caution tape tied to the entrance sign. Britta has the urge to take it and tuck it away somewhere special, but she resists. She goes to the grocery store instead and buys nothing but fruit—apples and strawberries and pears and oranges and kiwis and pineapple. She fills an entire shopping cart with fruit and as she drives home she thinks of pies and fruit salads and smoothies and juice: things she can make with her hands that will distract her from Annie and maybe the rest of her friends. Britta has no doubt Annie’s already told them all about it but Annie’s also leaving tomorrow to move over an hour away and start a new life and maybe a new study group. It stings, the thought of Annie at a table in a study room with a new handful of people, in a way Britta had never expected it to sting.

When she opens the door, Jeff is sitting on the couch in boxers and a t-shirt, the ever-present laptop balanced on his thighs. “Hey,” he says, barely looking up. “How was lunch?”

“Disastrous,” she mutters as she lugs her grocery bags to the kitchen. She takes out all the fruit and spreads it over the kitchen table, inventorying her purchases.

“What d’you mean?” Jeff calls.

She doesn’t answer, just gets out the cutting board and a knife and begins cutting strawberries into halves and then quarters. She makes neat piles like Annie’s salad: the stems, berries to put in the freezer, berries to sprinkle with sugar, berries to put into smoothies for breakfast. Her hands stain red with juice and it looks like blood and when she reaches up to push hair out of her eyes she can feel the juice on her forehead.

Jeff comes in and sits across from her. “Did you rob a farm stand?”

“I paid for this, thank you very much,” she says coldly.

He watches as she moves on to the cantaloupe and scoops out the seeds and cuts the melon into neat cubes. “You wanna talk about what happened?”

“I didn’t make things better with Annie,” she says, not looking up. “I made them worse.”

“Did you tell her—?”

“No. I uh, well, I called the whole group out for being assholes about my psych major. And then I accused her of being jealous of me because of you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well.” He leans across the table and wipes the strawberry juice off her forehead. “Then what happened?”

“She left. It was a stupid thing to say. I know I shouldn’t have said it. But I’m _so tired_ of them ganging up on me _again_. It’s all they do. No matter what I do it’s never good enough for them.” She accents her words with chops of melon. The knife slides through so silkily and it’s effortless, really.

“You take a lot of shit you shouldn’t have to take,” he says carefully and she shrugs. “And I’m just as guilty as giving it as they are.”

“Are you apologizing?”

“Maybe. Sorry I was a dick to you for the last four years. I’m glad you stick around with me anyway.”

She can’t help but smile, just a small one, but it’s there. “Shirley’s gonna yell at us again.”

“That wasn’t so much yelling as it was saying harsh things in a scary voice.”

“I could make her a pie.”

“You have all the ingredients.”

“We could have smoothies for dinner.”

He nods. “Can I ask you an asshole question without you calling me an asshole?”

“Probably not, but you can try.”

He shrugs one shoulder and makes a vague hand gesture. “Did you and Annie ever... talk about me? Like, before?”

“Wow. That is an asshole question. Good job pointing it out before I had the chance to.”

“Fine, you don’t have to answer.”

She chuckles darkly. “Jeff, you completely destroyed whatever friendship Annie and I had. It was never the same after you kissed her. We pretended and we hugged it out and we changed the subject, but it was never the same. You made me become the girl I said I would never be.”

“What girl?”

“The girl who lets boys get in the way.”

She’s chopping up the pineapple now, cutting the layers of skin away. It’s sticky and messy but smells tropical and sweet. She wonders if she should take some of the money stash and go somewhere with a beach and drink cocktails out of a coconut.

“So I guess, in retrospect,” she continues, “it doesn’t really matter what I say to Annie about you because it’s always going to be about you. You’re always going to be that _thing_ between us. And I should hate you for that.”

“You don’t?”

She pops a chunk of pineapple into her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, because of internalized misogyny and inner-group competition, you and I were always closer than Annie and I.”

“Ah. I see.” He raises his eyebrows and nods in that way he does when he thinks what she’s saying is bullshit, but only a little bit. She knows that he knows that she’s always secretly right. His facial expressions have gotten too easy to read.

“Besides,” she says. “You’re the one I should worry about. You and Annie have had this _whatever_ for a long time now. How do I know something didn’t happen between the two of you?”

Jeff pulls some grapes off the bunch. “I had a delusion she and I were sleeping together in an alternate timeline.”

Britta stops mid-cut. “What?”

“Before I graduated,” he sighs, “I was... feeling weird about it and I thought about what you said about Abed and the Darkest Timeline and I had this whole daydream about evil versions of ourselves and I was Annie’s lawyer and I got her out of the mental ward and we were sleeping together and we came to destroy all of you. There were magic paintballs.”

“I’m not really sure how to react to that,” Britta confesses.

“Me neither. But the point is, that’s the only time Annie and I have ever slept together. In a delusion.”

“Do you want to sleep with her? In reality?”

He pauses. “Do you mean if I’m attracted to her? Because the answer to that is yes. Do I wish that she and I would work together? Sometimes. Do I think we ever will? No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he stops and looks around the kitchen, as if the answer is written on the cupboards. “Because Annie’s still a good person. She’s whole. A little cracked, but still intact. And I’m... not.”

She starts slicing an apple and hands him a piece. “What have you been doing on the computer?”

“I didn’t want to tell you until I had every detail in place,” he says, “but I guess I’m as far enough along as I’m going to get.” He stands up. “Come on.”

She follows him into the living room and sits next to him on the couch. He settles the laptop so it’s on each of their legs. “I’ve been researching.”

He pulls up a window and on the screen is a face: it’s a man, maybe in his fifties or sixties, with greasy salt-and-pepper hair and beady, dark eyes. His skin is sallow in the way that looks like it hasn’t seen the sun in years. He’s gained a significant amount of weight since the last time she saw him, but she’d recognize him anywhere.

Her heart sputters and then beats in double-time and for a second she thinks she’s having a heart attack. The taste of pineapple, before so sweet, is now sour in her mouth and she can taste it mix with bile in her throat.

Jeff is watching her hesitantly, his hand hovering over hers like he’s not sure how to react. “He did three years in prison for molestation. Got out on parole a year ago. Lives near Fort Collins.”

“Three years?” she croaks. “You mean he did this to someone else?”

“Another little girl.”

Britta shoves the computer into Jeff’s lap and turns away. “Why?”

“Ever since you told me, I can’t get it out of my head—”

“No,” she interrupts. “That’s not fair. That wasn’t the deal.”

“I _know_ , okay? Look.” He closes the laptop and moves it to the coffee table. “I’m sorry. But I can’t help it. So I thought if I could find him somehow we could... I don’t know, steal from him. Do _something_.”

“How?”

“When you’re a convicted sex offender, it’s not too difficult to find information about you on the internet. I figured that if he did it to you, he probably did it to someone else, too. And I called some of my lawyer friends and had them comb through their resources.”

Britta thinks of that other little girl, and how someone believed her. But does it matter? Does it matter if someone believes you? Because it still happened, it’s still there, tethered to you for the rest of your life. It still blackens your insides and makes you hard and dark and the worst.

“I want to kill him,” she says. And she’s surprised when it comes out of her mouth but she realizes she means it with every inch of herself.

Jeff is quiet for a minute but then he nods, his jaw clenched and eyes steely, and grabs her hand and squeezes it tight. “Okay.”

* * *

The first week of September, Britta finds out that Jeff didn’t pay his rent with his share of the bank money. She’s not entirely sure why, but it means his landlord evicts him, so he rents a U-Haul and a storage unit and looks at her sheepishly. “I’m not sure if it’s okay to call Troy and Abed and ask them to help, so... how do you feel about moving a couch?”

The last time Britta was in Jeff’s apartment was Christmas. Then, it was filled with people and presents and decorations. It looks empty now, stale and old and dusty. She spent an entire year of her life here, hiding out, scared that someone would catch her and find out about her and Jeff. But it’s another place she’ll never be again and so she starts on the kitchen, wrapping plates and glasses in newspaper. They divide everything into piles: things to take to Britta’s, things to send to storage, things to leave behind as garbage. Most of Jeff’s important things are already at Britta’s apartment.

It takes them the better part of the day and they’re about to load the truck for the first delivery when there’s a knock on the door. “Can you get that?” Jeff calls from the bedroom.

Britta’s not sure who it would even be, but she opens the door anyway. Dean Pelton is standing there, and it’s strange to see him in jeans and a button-down. “Oh. Britta. It’s you.”

“Hi, Dean Pelton,” she says. “Um, what’s up?”

He looks over her shoulder into the living room, where boxes are stacked and half-filled and the place is generally a mess. “I heard loud noises and I thought I’d stop by to see what was going on. Is Jeff here? Because I haven’t seen him coming or going in a long time.”

“Oh, yeah. Jeff’s been staying at my place and he’s moving in with me.”

Dean Pelton gives her a look of disdain and she scrunches up her nose. “I wasn’t aware the two of you were together again.”

Britta waves her hand dismissively. “Eh.”

“Ah, I see. So, will we be seeing you next week at Greendale? Going to finish that psych degree?”

Thankfully she doesn’t have to answer because Jeff comes out of the bedroom to see who was at the door. “Oh, Dean Pelton. What are you doing here?”

“Just... checking in. Didn’t realize you were moving. Oh, and you shaved the beard! A good decision if I ever saw one.”

Jeff runs a hand over his jaw. “Thanks, I guess. So, uh, Britta told you I was moving out?”

“Yes and I can’t say I’m not disappointed! You chose an... _interesting_ new roommate, I guess. Anyway, so classes start next Monday, Britta, and there are still plenty of seats in Professor Duncan’s Advanced Psych class.” He turns around in the doorway and starts off down the hall. “I’d offer to help you move, but there are Fresh Start Dances to plan!”

When his own door clicks shut Jeff turns to Britta and raises his eyebrows. “Advanced Psych, huh?”

She makes a face and shuts the door before heading back to the kitchen.

“You know,” he says as he follows her. “If you want to go back, don’t not do it because of me. It doesn’t change anything.”

“I thought you said I wouldn’t be happy.”

He leans against the counter. “I said I didn’t think you’d be happy as a therapist. There are other things you can do. You can change your major.”

She shrugs. “Maybe one day. Maybe after all _this_.”

“This?”

She dips her head so her hair falls in her face and concentrates on wrapping a plate in newspaper. “Um, Fort Collins.”

She hears him move and an arm comes around her waist and she leans back into him. “What do you think is going to happen after it’s done?” he asks softly.

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. She’s been thinking of it constantly, what she’ll feel right before she does it, while she’s doing it, after she does it. She expects to feel some sort of relief or vindication but she’s terrified she won’t feel anything.

“You can back out, you know,” he says. “It’s not a big deal. You can go back to school and we’ll figure something else out.”

She shakes her head. “No. I wanna do this.”

He rests his chin on the top of her head. “Okay. Just don’t be afraid to tell me, okay? This only works if we’re a team.”

“A team,” she repeats as a small smile spreads over her face.

* * *

The drive to Fort Collins is around an hour but it seems like it only takes a few minutes. They’ve rented a car, a nondescript red car, and Jeff drives because Britta doesn’t trust herself to. He found a Lady Gaga CD in his apartment when they packed it up that he claims belongs to Annie and it’s the only thing they listen to the whole way there. It’s loud and the bass thumps and vibrates in her chest. It’s distracting.

They’re wearing all black again because it’s more forgiving in case they’re spotted afterward. But it’s October now and they won’t look out of place in long pants and sweaters. The air is dry and crisp and the leaves are changing colors. Fall semester started over a month ago and Britta has yet to set foot on Greendale campus.

She’s wearing the purple wig again, her own hair pulled back tight underneath. She’s not entirely sure why she felt the need to put it on, especially after the close call at the bank, but it feels like a mask, like a piece of who she used to be, and it’s comforting to have some sort of separation. Jeff has three days of scruff on his face—though he’s promised no beard this time—and the hem is coming undone on his sweater.

They’re halfway there when Britta realizes she never even learned his name. It was on the webpage Jeff had pulled up, she assumed, but she hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away from the photo to read it. And she hasn’t been able to look at it again; Jeff’s laptop remained closed on the table for four days before he went back to researching, but he never mentioned a name. They talk about him in hushed voices and verbally italicized pronouns and calculated plans.

There’s a GPS in the car but Jeff thinks it’s safer to use the one on his phone instead, so Britta holds it up and calls out directions when they get off the highway. It’s a nice enough city, one Britta’s never been to before, and as they get closer and closer they end up in what looks like a sketchy part of town, a part where a convicted child molester could live undetected.

“It’s this one.” Britta points to a blue duplex and her mouth is dry and tastes like cotton. There’s a small front yard with an overgrown lawn and weeds climbing up the sides of the front stoop. The door is red.

Jeff parks the car two houses down and turns the ignition off but makes no move to get out. “You’re ready?”

She nods with false bravado and notices that his hands are clenched into fists. She never thought to ask him if _he’s_ okay; this had been her suggestion, after all. “What about you?”

“You don’t want to hear this,” he says with a wry smile, “but I want to do this for you.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to hear that. I don’t need you to save me.”

“I know. Trust me, I _know_. If there’s anyone who doesn’t need saving, it’s you.”

“So then why do you want to do this so badly?”

He sighs. “You promise not to make fun of me?”

“No.”

“Fine. Someone hurt you and now I want to hurt them.”

“That’s pretty mushy, Winger,” she says, the snark and the sarcasm comfortable in her mouth. It makes her heart slow down a little bit, lets her forget about the bag at her feet filled with awful things.

“Oh, what do you know?” He leans across the emergency brake to kiss her, careful of his hands and her wig.

The longer they kiss the more settled her stomach becomes. It’s just past eleven in the morning on a Wednesday; the streets are pretty deserted. A few cars drive by but they all pass the blue house and the rest of the houses on the block. With one final kiss to the corner of her mouth, he pulls away and unbuckles his seat belt.

When she steps out of the car it’s on unsteady legs but as they walk up the driveway something steels itself inside of her and she’s the one who rings the doorbell, the sleeve of her sweater pulled down over her thumb. No fingerprints.

When he opens the door all the air is sucked from her lungs because it’s _him_ and his eyes are the same and he still smells like bourbon and cigarettes and this is now the most effective anti-smoking method she’s ever gone through.

Jeff takes over then, says something, and it’s like the bank robbery because her brain goes fuzzy and his words sound like they’re all underwater. Jeff has a gun—a real gun, a gun she bought from a guy she once knew from her anarchist days (“You know the seedy underbelly of Greendale, don’t you?” “Winger, I know the seedy underbelly of _everywhere_.”), a gun they need just in case—jabbed into the guy’s round stomach and he holds up his hands and backs up into the dank living room, which is littered with newspapers and take-out containers. A TV plays _The Price is Right_ in the background and Britta puts on a pair of leather gloves and then turns the volume up a little to mask any sound the walls might betray. Jeff makes him sit down on a faded armchair, gun in his face.

He begins to cry, his face scrunching into something even uglier and in that moment, Jeff’s gun in his face and Drew Carey explaining the rules of Hi Lo, Britta finally feels like she has some miniscule amount of power over him. She opens her bag and takes out a kitchen knife, cleaned and sharpened and carefully wiped free of any traces of her or Jeff. There’s a blanket on the floor and she picks it up and cuts off a square.

“Why are you doing this?” he whimpers, his voice cutting through the buzz in Britta’s head.

“Because you did it to me first,” Britta replies before shoving the blanket square in his mouth. His hands are free, but he doesn’t move to take it out.

She lays a hand on Jeff’s arm and gently pushes him. He hesitates but she nods and he moves to the side, the gun still pointed.

The knife goes in smooth. His muffled screams are far, far away, down a long hallway or through a thick wall. Britta makes one X and then another. There’s blood everywhere, on her gloves, on her pants, on her sweater. It soaks into the fabric of the chair and spills onto the floor. It looks like a movie. It looks unreal.

Jeff is still holding the gun on him, even as he sputters his last breaths, and Britta notices Jeff’s hand is shaking, just slightly. Her own hand is steady.

The phrase _out of body experience_ never meant anything to her until this moment. She feels like she’s looking down on herself, covered in blood and holding a knife, someone’s skin stretched open before her. A face that once haunted her and maybe it still will, but this time she is the victorious one.

He slumps over finally with a gasp and Britta takes a step back. She and Jeff are both silent and still for a minute, waiting to see if something else will happen. She places the knife on the floor and looks around the room. There’s a phone on a table near what looks like the entrance to the kitchen. “Do you want to call?”

Jeff looks conflicted but shakes his head. “No. Let’s just go.” His voice is tight.

They slip out the front door, the neighborhood still deserted. Britta’s not worried about being seen because of the wig, but she wishes she had insisted on Jeff wearing some sort of disguise. She keeps telling herself that he’s a tall white guy and as easy to overlook as snow in February. When they get in the car he turns to look at her.

“I—”

“No,” she interrupts. “Please don’t say anything. Please just drive.”

He nods and puts the car in gear. She watches the blue house as they drive away. When it’s out of sight, she carefully takes off her gloves and shoes and wraps them in a plastic bag. There’s plastic on the floor and on the seats they were smart enough to think of earlier, and it’s a good thing, because the interior is tan and Britta is covered in blood.

As they get closer and closer to home Britta’s stomach starts to turn and twist because this is a real thing that just happened. Every mile that takes Britta farther from the blue house takes her closer to having to deal with this now and for the rest of her life. Would it be so hard, she wonders, to go back in time to her eleventh birthday and remember her goddamn sweater the first time? Is it too much to ask for to have a life not filled with some sort of trauma or nightmares where she can go about her day without carrying all this shit around?

Jeff pulls into the parking lot and without a word, Britta gathers up the bags. She walks barefoot up to the front door and she unlocks it and as soon as she crosses the threshold she throws the bags and her wig on the floor and begins stripping her clothes. She leaves them on the floor, a trail behind her, on her way to the bathroom. She turns the shower to the hottest she can stand and steps out of her underwear and under the spray.

It’s only a minute of standing there before the curtain pulls back and he steps inside. She doesn’t say anything, just looks up at him and she can feel the prick of tears in her eyes and he looks so old and so tired and a sob catches in her throat and she falls against him and he catches her.

He doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. She doesn’t want comfort and he knows that, so he strokes her hair and lets her sob and his hands are still shaking but he holds her steady. Blood from her body, blood that isn’t hers, swirls down the drain, pink from the water. She closes her eyes tight and squeezes him closer until she isn’t sure where she ends and he begins.

* * *

“Can I ask you one thing?” he says later as they’re on the bed wrapped in bathtowels.

She nods.

“You said your dad didn’t believe you. What if you showed him the criminal record?”

“Jeff. My dad’s dead,” she says softly.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugs. “Because you never asked. And I don’t know, it just seemed like something I shouldn’t talk about with you and your whole dad thing.”

“Christ, Britta. You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders all the time. You can let someone else help you out every once in a while.”

“Yeah, because I’m sure the thing you needed to hear when you were meeting your dad for the first time in twenty-five years was about how my dad is dead. Solid friendship skills right there, Winger.”

They’re both lying on their backs not touching aside from their tangled legs. The sun is starting to set but there’s still so much to be done: clothes and bags to burn, blood to scrub from the floor, the rental car to return. Britta doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep tonight because even now, as she just blinks, he’s there behind her eyelids, eyes pleading with her to stop and blood pouring from open wounds she caused. She guesses Jeff won’t be sleeping, either, because he’s still so pale, even after they scrubbed each other raw under the hottest water her pipes could give them.

It’s not that she regrets it. Because—so far, anyway—she doesn’t. She had never expected him to come out from lurking in the shadows, she wasn’t afraid of running into him in a dark alley some night, but there was just something unnerving about not knowing his name or where he could potentially be. Now, she still doesn’t know his name, but she knows where he is, his body decaying inside his apartment, maybe until the neighbor notices the smell. It was a game, and they had been uneven for so many years, but Britta has emerged triumphant.

“How can I feel like I know everything and nothing about you at the same time?” Jeff asks. “I watched you murder someone today but I don’t know anything about your parents.”

“Yeah, well, I thought you actually had appendicitis until a year ago,” she says. “Why does this bother you so much?”

“I don’t know. I thought I had you pegged, I guess.”

She twists her neck so she can smile at him. “You thought wrong.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, suppressing a grin. Then his face turns serious. “You’re okay, though, right? With today?”

She lets out a breath slowly. “I will be. Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

They’re quiet for a while and she thinks he’s fallen asleep when he says, “Thank you for letting me do that for you.”

“I didn’t let you do anything for me. I did that for myself. I just needed you to drive.”

His arm comes down around her and pulls her in close. “Shhh. Just let me pretend, okay.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re delusional, Winger. As usual.”


	5. Part V

The murder is on the news a few days later, but the media isn’t very sympathetic when a convicted child molester is killed, even in a violent and vicious way. The police have no leads and almost no evidence, they say, a few things they need to investigate further before releasing any details, but for the moment, anyway, it looks like Jeff and Britta are safe.

Britta has nightmares for the first week or so, wakes up at three in the morning in cold sweats and blankets tangled around her to the point of near-suffocation. Jeff takes sleeping pills before going to bed every night; he sleeps heavy and deep and dreamless. He doesn’t wake up when she does so sometimes she’ll shake him until he starts awake and he’ll look at her, bleary-eyed, and he’ll know; he rearranges the blankets for her and laces his fingers with hers and waits until she falls back asleep before closing his eyes.

Jeff follows the investigation through the news so she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t want to know any of the details so he fills her in on the bigger picture over dinner each night.

“We were careful,” he reassures over and over.

“But what if we weren’t?” she asks. “How do we protect ourselves?”

He shrugs. “We get married.”

She scrunches her face in disgust. “Very funny.”

“I’m serious. A husband and wife can’t legally testify against each other. So unless they’ve got some amazing evidence or a stellar witness, we’d be safe. For everything.”

Britta pushes her stir fry around her plate. They’ve eaten stir fry six times in the last two weeks. They had drinks at the Red Door four times. Britta brought Shirley a homemade cherry pie and Shirley accepted it with a tight smile on her face. They had pizza with Troy and Abed and Troy stared sadly at Britta the entire time. Annie hasn’t called or texted or emailed or Facebooked from Colorado Springs. Britta feels suffocated again.

“I’m not asking you to have a big wedding where you wear a white dress and we pick some Etta James song to dance to. I’m saying that we go to the courthouse and we get a marriage license and we keep ourselves safe.”

“I want to leave,” she decides. “We get married and we do one more thing and then we go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

They stare at each other across the table and Jeff nods, resignation in his eyes. “What’s the one more thing?” But he knows, just as she knows.

Thanksgiving is coming, only two weeks away. Shirley invited them to dinner at her house with her family—no in-laws this year—and Britta had given a noncommittal shrug. When Britta first brought up Fort Collins she had seen the look in Jeff’s eye, the look that said that if this was possible what else could be? Because it’s been almost a year and no word, no phone call or anything, and Christmas and Father’s Day and Jeff’s birthday have all come and gone.

“One for me and one for you,” she says.

“And then we go?”

“And then we go. New York, Chicago, the Arizona desert. We can leave the country. Anywhere but Colorado.”

He nods again. “But I don’t want to do it like... like _that_. It needs to look natural. He’s older now, it wouldn’t be unheard of.”

“However you want.”

“I’ll have to do some research.”

“Take your time.”

“We can be married by the end of the week. And we’ll probably have to stick around for the funeral.”

“Okay.” She watches as his hand disappears underneath the table and she knows it’s on his scar. His fingers drift there almost subconsciously more often than they used to, or maybe it’s just that now she knows what the scar is she notices it. It’s not a motion she understands because she doesn’t have a scar; hers are all internal and cause her to get the urge to do things like rip the hair out of her head or dig her nails into her arms and thighs until they bleed. She meant what she said, though, when she told him she’d be okay—the urges will go away and she will be faded lines of tissue, maybe white, maybe only visible when the light hits a certain way.

He chews his dinner slowly, jaw tight and working methodically. His face is ashen and there are dark circles underneath his eyes. Being a villain is not for the weak of heart. Jeff’s heart isn’t weak, it is strong, it pumps blood throughout his body and it allows him to love and to hate in equally fierce ways. But this is the time he needs for her to put his weight on her shoulders again, and she will, because it’s what she does, it’s what they do.

“I think,” she says, nudging his foot under the table, “that I want you to properly propose to me. Just for fun. Just to see how you’d do it.”

“I don’t have a ring,” he says, a slight smile appearing at the corner of his mouth.

“Doesn’t matter. _You’d_ probably buy me a blood diamond or something.”

He rolls his eyes but stands up anyway. “Okay, so if it were anyone but you, I’d get down on one knee and say something about true love and forever.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” he says, dropping down to his knees in front of her, “that you would see through that in a heartbeat. You’re more of a pain in the ass than any other woman I’ve ever known.”

“Stellar proposal, really,” she drawls. “What I’ve been dreaming of all my life.”

“Shush. Now, as I was saying. With you. It would have to be something simple. No kiss cams, no asking the waiter to bring the ring to the table.” He presses a long kiss to her left knee and trails up, higher, higher, his mouth dragging along her jeans to her upper thigh. “Marry me.”

She swallows thickly. “You’ve thought about this?”

“No. I just… I know you.” He says it so simply that she knows it’s not a lie.

“Well,” she says, reaching out to run a hand through his hair. “Under normal circumstances, I’d say no. But I don’t really have a choice now, do I?”

“Hey.” His eyebrows furrow and he frowns. “You have a choice. You’ve always had a choice.”

“I know,” she says softly. “I know.”

She’s not sure how to articulate it, that it was never a _choice_ for her, not really, because _he_ was never a choice: just something that happened to her without her even realizing, something that happened over and over again until it was impossible for her to turn away.

She takes his hand and nudges him softly so they can both stand up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To celebrate.”

She leads him to the bedroom and as he pulls her shirt over her head he asks, “So that’s a yes?” She can’t help but laugh, long and hard.

* * *

They buy two wedding bands, plain and white gold, to keep up appearances. They have more to lose than before. So they go to the courthouse in nice enough clothes: Jeff wears dress pants and a dress shirt with no jacket or tie and Britta wears the blue dress she wore to his graduation. But she insists they both wear sneakers because there’s a thin line between taking this very seriously and taking this as a joke and Britta wants to stay firmly on the joke side of the line. She never thought she’d be getting married and even though it doesn’t mean anything, she needs to keep reminding herself of that because there are words like _vows_ and _bride_ that are throwing her off her game.

They convince two secretaries to give up their lunch breaks to serve as witnesses with a sob story of how their friends and families don’t approve of their relationship and with a baby on the way, it’s very important for them to get married as soon as possible. Britta adds this last part in with a sheepish smile and hand on her stomach and Jeff’s mouth opens and closes a few times before nodding. The secretaries _oooh_ and _aaah_ over the two of them and Jeff and Britta exchange a discrete eye roll on the way to the judge.

It’s a short and impersonal ceremony, just how Britta wants it, and the band on her finger feels heavy with secrets and lies and choices. When they kiss Jeff traces the letters _ok_ into her hip and when she pulls back she nods, smiling. The secretaries cheer and insist on taking a picture of them.

“Something we can give the kids,” Jeff says, a hand on the small of her back.

Britta smiles the fakest, cheesiest grin she can and when they bound down the steps back to the parking lot, she feels like they already got away with something.

* * *

Jeff does the research again, downloading IP-rerouting software to mask his searches and running ideas by Britta as she starts packing up the essentials. She finds an old atlas in the back of her closet and runs her fingers along lines of highways and rivers and she makes lists of places and routes.

“Have you ever been to London?” she asks. “What about Amsterdam?”

He shakes his head and listens with a small smile on his face as she prattles on about the countries and cities she’s been to, far away from Greendale and Colorado and even America. “We have the money,” she reminds him. “There’s so much more out there than this.”

They spend three weeks trailing William Winger and Willy Jr. so they can scope out patterns. Willy works at a Best Buy in Riverside Falls and William is apparently retired; he doesn’t leave the house in any sort of discernible regularity.

(“You never asked him what he did for a living?” Britta asks as they crouch low in the front seats of her car, parked in the back corner of William’s parking lot.

“When I was a kid his job was drinking scotch and hitting my mom, so no, I didn’t ask him how his career worked out for him,” Jeff snaps back.)

Eventually they learn Willy’s work schedule, but it takes a lot of hanging out in the car drinking sodas out of fast food cups and sharing large fries to get there. Each time William steps outside Jeff’s knuckles clench white and the car goes silent until William is out of sight.

“What’s it like?” Jeff asks one day as William gets in his car and drives away. “What’s it like when you kill them? Do you feel better?”

Britta thinks carefully as she crews a French fry. “You do and you don’t. I feel better because I’m the one who did it, you know? I got him before he could get me again. But I still had to do it. It’s not necessarily a _good_ feeling.”

“I don’t know what’s worse: that he left me as a kid or that he met me as an adult and still didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“He’s an asshole,” Britta says with a sneer. “I know I pushed you to confront him, but that was only because I thought it would help. I would have told him to fuck off if I were you. Although, what you did was probably more effective than that.”

“How did your dad die?”

“Heart attack. My mother likes to tell me he died of grief after I dropped out of high school and ran away. I’m sure the alcohol and cigars and constant yelling had nothing to do with it.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“Nah. She calls me every once in a while to tell remind me what a disappointment I am and how my brothers are doing so much more with their lives.”

“Hmm. My mom still thinks I’m a lawyer.”

“Did you tell her about meeting your dad?”

“I gave her some vague details.”

“She’s my mother-in-law now. Is that weird to you? It’s weird to me. Are you going to introduce me to her as your wife?”

“I guess.”

“It’ll be good to see her at least once before we leave, right?”

“Yeah. She’ll come to the funeral. Stroke is how I want to do it, I think.”

“Okay,” she says gently. “Do you know how—?”

“Air embolism,” he interrupts. “You inject a syringe full of air into a vein and the air bubble blocks blood from traveling to the heart.”

“And it’s undetectable?”

“Should be. Just gotta find the right place to stick the syringe.”

She looks at the spot where William’s car was parked. “Pick a day and I’m there.”

He’s staring at the spot, too, even when his hand moves to rest on her knee. “Next Wednesday.”

* * *

Doing it the day before Thanksgiving ensures a few things: one, they won’t have to go to Shirley’s for dinner and suffer more of the group’s disappointed looks; two, there is a sense of symmetry and neatness about doing it a year after that first day; three, Willy will be at work late, preparing for Black Friday madness.

Their clothes and important things are already packed and ready to go if necessary. They’ve unearthed all the hidden money and there’s enough to get them through for a while, maybe buy them some false identification if it comes to that. Britta spends a long time piling it all in a duffel bag, making sure it’s all there, every last dollar, because it is important, it is their lifeline, it is what will get them out.

They wake up early on Wednesday morning out of nerves, and Jeff is quiet and resolute as they lay in bed and the sunrise shoots weakly through the blinds.

“Let’s go somewhere warm,” Britta says. She pulls the blankets up over both of their heads so they’re cocooned underneath. Somewhere, some long time ago, Troy and Abed built blanket fort after blanket fort, lived in a blanket fort, turned the entire school into a blanket fort. “Somewhere there’s a beach and warm sand and we can sit by the ocean.”

“Only if you wear a bikini,” he says with a smirk, his fingers coming up to touch her face.

She rolls her eyes. “We’re not having beach sex, though. Sand takes _forever_ to get out of places and it’s never comfortable.”

“What about now?” he asks. His eyes are wide and there’s something hiding behind them. He’s scared, she knows this, but he’ll never tell her.

“We’re not on a beach yet.” She reaches down to stroke his cock and he closes his eyes and presses his face into the crook of her neck.

“ _Please_ ,” he gasps and Jeff Winger does not beg, does not say please, does not ask for anything. He gives and he takes but he’ll be damned if he ever looks even the littlest bit desperate.

But today is different, today is his day, today is the day they eliminate the source of his _Jeffness_. The first step to repair, as Britta learned in her psych class, is self-direction: optimizing autonomy and independence and control over yourself and your resources. According to Britta, that means destroying what made you broken in the first place, preferably in a manner of your own choosing. Britta will never be a psychologist.

She kisses him and then climbs over him and fucks him, soft and a little sweet. He gasps and moans and chants her name over and over like a prayer. His nails dig into her sides as if he’s trying to anchor himself to her. He comes with his mouth on hers, his tongue against hers, his wedding ring searing her like hot coal.

He flips them over and hovers over her body, kisses from her mouth to her hipbones with a look of determined concentration. He sucks on her clit and strokes the skin of her stomach as she bucks up and her legs shake with her orgasm. He kisses his way back up and she holds him against her, his head over her heart, as she regains her breath. She feels her heart slow and she wipes sweat from his forehead and for a few more minutes she lets them just be.

* * *

Willy’s working the 11–7 shift. He leaves the house at 10:42 and won’t be home until at least 7:25. They have plenty of time. Jeff can’t stomach breakfast so Britta makes a smoothie for herself and brews him a cup of strong coffee. “You need something,” she says, handing him the mug.

He wraps his hands around it and nods. He drinks the whole thing too fast.

Britta drives and when they pull into the parking lot—not the back corner spot they usually occupy, but a regular, close spot—she turns to Jeff. “You don’t _have_ to do this, you know. We can go home and get all the stuff and leave now. Or, we don’t even have to leave, we can stay and have dinner at Shirley’s tomorrow. Whatever you want to do.”

“Stop,” he says. “I appreciate this but we both know this is what I have to do. This is the plan and this is the way it has to be.”

“Okay,” she says. She thinks there’s something else she should tell him but she’s not sure what it is. She’s worried that he’s going to back out while they’re in there, and she has no right or reason to think this because she should trust him completely (“This only works if we’re a team,” he told her) but this is his _dad_ , not some stranger who hurt him one time twenty years ago.

“You’re my best friend,” she says finally. “Just... know that. Before we go in there.”

“Gettin’ sappy on me, huh, Perry?” he smirks, a silent _thank you_ in his words.

William answers the door with a look of surprise. “Jeff. What are you doing here?”

“Can we come in?” Jeff asks. His voice is even and calm.

“Sure. Have a seat.” William notices the rings on their fingers and he looks at Britta, who’s wearing the purple wig again, but doesn’t say anything.

“Actually, you sit. We’re going to stand,” Jeff says.

“What’s this about?”

Jeff nods at Britta and she takes the gun out of her purse and holds it on William. “It’s about a lot of things,” Jeff says.

William makes a move to stand up but Britta shakes her head. “Don’t.”

“This is ridiculous. You’re going to kill me?”

“Not her,” Jeff says. “Me.” He takes the syringe out of his jacket pocket and holds it up to the light as if inspecting it. “Just a simple stroke. And who won’t believe it? All those years of drinking probably haven’t been good on the ticker. You’re up there in age, Dad.”

William lets out a strangled laugh. “Jesus, Jeff. I was a shit dad to you. We already established that. But don’t you think this is taking it a little far?”

Jeff shrugs. “Maybe.”

Britta stays quiet and lets Jeff handle the situation. This is Jeff in control, in his element. It’s like at the bank, when she froze up and he knew exactly what to do. He’s good at this, this composed and cold method of crime. She keeps her finger on the trigger knowing she won’t need it. It’s a precaution only. William won’t go quietly, but she has no doubt Jeff can overpower him if it comes to that.

“So you’re going to kill me and then what? What happens when your brother gets home?”

“Luckily you won’t have to worry about that.”

Jeff pins his father to the couch, his thighs holding down William’s arms. Jeff is strong, Britta knows this, but he must be stronger than he lets on because William thrashes and struggles but he cannot get free. Jeff pushes his head back into the couch and injects the syringe into his neck.

William starts gasping for air and trying to form words and Britta closes her eyes because she can’t watch. This is how her father died, not in the same situation, not by the hand of his child or anyone, a heart attack instead of a stroke, but it’s similar enough. Britta had been in Paris at the time, sleeping on some guy’s couch with her ex-boyfriend Jean and she got a series of confusing phone calls from her mother and brothers trying to track her down. She hadn’t asked for the details because she didn’t want them but now they’re all there in front of her and she can’t bear to see them after all these years.

Finally, the noises stop and Britta opens one eye. Jeff is standing now, too, staring at William’s lifeless body. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

Britta uses her jacket sleeve to open and close the door. They get in the car and she starts to drive away, neither of them saying anything. The silence is a bit deafening but she decides to let him be the one to speak; if he wants to talk he will and if he doesn’t that’s fine, too.

“Liquor store,” he says when they’re halfway home.

She nods and goes to the one a few blocks from her apartment. He reaches in his pocket for his wallet and pulls some bills out. “Here... eighty bucks. Get anything you can. Something strong and then whatever you want. Please.”

* * *

Britta has seen Jeff in various states of drunkenness. But after he’s polished off half the bottle of whiskey and he’s slurring his words so badly she can barely understand him, she’s positive this is the drunkest she’s ever seen him.

She had two shots of vodka to calm her nerves but now she’s sitting with him on the couch as he drinks. He’s slumped into her and she’s stroking his hair. He keeps talking about his dad, about what it was like before and after he left. She’s never heard him say so much about himself in all the years she’s known him.

“Do you regret it?” Britta asks.

“No,” he says. “I fucking hate him, Britta. I hate him so much. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad I killed him.”

She kisses the top of his head. “Jeff, I think you should go to bed. We’re going to have a lot to do tomorrow.”

He tries to sit up but can’t so she gently lays him down on the couch. “I’ll get you a glass of water and then I’ll help you to bed, okay?”

“Mmmhmm,” he murmurs.

She sets the glass of water on the nightstand and goes back to the living room. It’s a struggle, but she manages to get him to bed where she takes off his jeans and shirt and tucks him under the covers. She helps him drink some water and wipes up what doesn’t make it into his mouth.

“Go to sleep, okay?”

“Britta,” he says as he pulls the blanket up to his chin, “you’re the only one who’s never left. They all leave, Britta. You don’t.”

She smiles sadly and leans down to kiss his cheek. “I know, Jeff. Because you’re the only one who’s never left me.”

She goes back to the living room to wait for the call. It comes in at almost ten-thirty, Willy’s name flashing on the screen of Jeff’s phone. He’s hysterical, of course, just like she knew he would be. He’s a sweet kid who doesn’t really deserve to be caught up in this mess. “They say a stroke,” he manages to get out. “Where’s Jeff?”

“He’s sleeping,” Britta says. “He wasn’t feeling well, so he took some sleeping pills. I’ll tell him, Willy.”

He promises to call again in the morning and Britta texts Shirley, _Jeff’s dad died. We’re going to spend tomorrow with his brother._ Then she crawls into bed and wraps Jeff’s arms around her and counts to five hundred before she falls asleep, William Winger’s dead face behind her eyelids.

* * *

The wake is on Saturday. There aren’t a lot of people there at all: a few of Willy’s co-workers, some of his teachers and classmates from high school, a handful of neighbors, and the study group. Jeff and Britta did most of the planning because Willy was crying too hard to make any decisions himself. Britta remembers psychoanalyzing him a year ago; she gets the urge for about a second but then just hugs him instead.

Britta’s talking to the elderly woman who lives next door to William when she sees the group. They walk into the funeral home together like one big mass: ShirleyAnnieAbedTroy. Britta catches Shirley’s eye and excuses herself from Mrs. Henson to go meet them.

“How’s Jeff?” Shirley asks as she hugs Britta.

“He’s okay,” Britta replies solemnly. She hugs each of them in turn and by the time she pulls away from Abed, Jeff is behind her, being enveloped by Shirley.

“Oh, Jeffrey, I’m so sorry.”

It’s when Jeff turns to hug Annie does Shirley notice the ring on his finger. She turns immediately to Britta and grabs her left hand. “What’s this?”

“It’s uh...” Britta stammers.

“Are you guys _married_?” Troy exclaims.

Even Abed’s eyes are wide and Annie breaks away from Jeff to stare at their hands. “What? When?” she asks.

“This is not the time or the place to talk about this,” Jeff says lowly. “It’s not a big deal. It was a courthouse wedding and it’s none of your business. So either drop it or leave.”

“But—” Annie starts.

“This is my father’s wake. We are not having this conversation here. Drop it.” He looks sort of scary and deranged and Annie visibly shrinks back. Troy moves forward, just an inch, and Britta steps in and places a hand on Jeff’s arm.

“Come on,” she says.

With one final look to their rings, Annie leads the group up to the front of the room to the casket. It’s closed, mostly because Jeff insisted and Willy wasn’t in any sort of state to argue, and Britta is glad because she’s had enough of William’s dead face for her lifetime.

Jeff stares at the carpet and takes a few deep breaths. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. This is… not an easy situation. I should have remembered the rings, we should have taken them off.”

“Look, I’m going to talk to my mom alone when she gets here. Hopefully it’ll go better than that did.”

She nods. “Okay. You should probably go make the rounds. You need to thank all these people for coming. And make sure your brother’s okay, if you get a chance?”

“Yeah. Be here in case I need you?”

“Of course. I’m just going to run to the bathroom real quick.”

He squeezes her hand before he walks away. She locks herself in the bathroom and sits on the counter for a few minutes, inhaling the overpowering scent of flowers; it’s enough to make her nauseous, even though she’s already feeling slightly so. She knew this would happen but Jeff had been right when he said it would look a thousand times more suspicious if there was a record of their wedding but no one else knew.

With a deep breath and a splash of cold water on her face, she yanks the bathroom door open and runs straight into someone. “Oh, sorry,” she says absently, but two hands grip her arms and she looks up and it’s Abed.

“Hi, Britta,” he says.

“Where’s everyone else?” she asks.

He points down the hall to the main room. “I told them I had to go to the bathroom. I’ve been looking for you.”

She raises a hand tiredly. “You can spare me the lecture, Abed. I’ve heard it all before but I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself.”

“You got married for protection, didn’t you?” he asks.

She freezes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It makes sense. You and Jeff don’t believe in marriage but you did it anyway, and it wasn’t to prove a point because no one else was around and you two like to make spectacles of yourselves. Also you didn’t invite us, which I think is kind of rude, and you didn’t prepare Troy and Annie for the news at all. They’re both going to be upset because they say they’re over you and Jeff respectively, but I don’t think they really are.”

Britta doesn’t say anything, just folds her arms over her chest and looks down at her shoes.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Abed continues. “But I know I’m right and I hope that whatever you two did, you don’t get caught. It’s probably better if you don’t tell me, because anyone who knows you is going to come to us first for answers. If I don’t know anything then I can’t say anything.”

His face is neutral as always but when Britta looks up at him she feels a knot in her throat and she swallows it down. “Abed, I need you to do something for me, okay?” She takes his hands in hers. “If Jeff and I aren’t around, you have to keep everyone together. And you have to make sure they know we love them. And you need to tell Annie and Troy... tell them that we’re sorry and we didn’t mean to hurt them. And Shirley, tell Shirley, too. Please, Abed.”

He nods and she leans into him, wraps her arms around his middle. His hand comes up to pat her on the back reassuringly. “I love you,” she says as she pulls away. “You should probably go back before they come looking for you.”

“Okay.” He gives her a small smile and walks back to the main room. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of nicotine gum and chews two pieces at once.

* * *

There are eight people at the funeral. It’s sort of sad and pathetic but Britta looks between Jeff and Willy and sees what horrible, awful things William Winger did to both of his sons and isn’t too surprised. It’s a quick graveside service with a reverend saying generic things about death and loss. Jeff holds Britta’s hand during the entire thing, his thumb stroking the round edges of her wedding ring. Shirley watches.

Jeff’s mother is a tough but sweet woman who is no taller than Britta. She pulls Britta in close and thanks her for being good to Jeff. She doesn’t seem upset by their marriage; it seems that she’s used to Jeff keeping things from her, and she admires the band on Britta’s finger with delight. It’s the first time Britta feels guilty about the things she’s done, because Doreen Winger loves her son in a way Britta’s own mother never loved her. Britta feels responsible, like she’s somehow led Jeff on this wrong path, that if she had told Jeff he was being stupid and pushed him to get a job, he would have been fine.

“He doesn’t call or visit much,” Doreen tells Britta as Jeff thanks the reverend for the service. “I know he’s busy with work and the two of you are probably enjoying your time together as newlyweds. But you’ll remind him not to forget about his mother, won’t you? And when this all settles a bit we can celebrate you joining the family.”

Britta nods and forces a smile. “Of course.”

Doreen pats Britta’s arm before she walks away, over to her son. Britta watches as she frames Jeff’s face with her hands and says something quietly. Jeff nods solemnly and hugs his mother, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

“He’ll be okay.” Britta turns around to find Shirley behind her. “It’ll be hard, but he’ll make it.”

“Yeah. Thanks for being here for him.”

Shirley nods. “I hope you know we just want what’s best for you.”

“I know. I appreciate it.”

With a smile, Shirley leans in for a hug. “You take care of yourself, okay? Him, too.”

“We should stay,” Britta says in the car on the way home, “for a few more weeks. Have dinner with your mother. Maybe Christmas.”

“She likes you,” Jeff says.

“She shouldn’t,” Britta mutters, facing the window.

* * *

It’s a week and a half later when it happens.

Jeff is on laundry duty and he left with a basket to take the towels out of the dryer in the basement. Britta’s making lunch, flipping grilled cheese sandwiches and mixing lemonade from a can. She hears Jeff’s phone vibrate in the living room but she ignores it until her own phone rings from its place on the kitchen table. She doesn’t recognize the number but she answers anyway.

“Britta Winger?” It’s a man’s voice, deep and unfamiliar.

“Perry,” she corrects automatically. “Uh, I mean, Perry-Winger. Britta Perry-Winger.”

“Ms. Perry-Winger, my name is Detective Willick with the Riverside Falls Police Department. I’m calling about your father-in-law, William Winger?”

Britta’s tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth but she manages to choke out a “Yes?”

“We’re reevaluating his death. Your brother-in-law seemed to find some evidence in the house that makes us suspect foul play.”

“Evidence?”

“We can’t disclose that information at the moment, but we have linked it to two other crimes in the area. Do you know if your father-in-law had any connection to a man named Dennis Portsmith? He lived in Fort Collins.”

“No. We’re not—my husband wasn’t close with his father.”

It’s in the middle of this sentence that Jeff comes back. He freezes in the doorway and Britta motions wildly with her free hand. He takes the basket of clean, folded towels straight into the bedroom and Britta can hear him opening drawers.

“Noted. We just wanted to contact you to let you know this is an ongoing investigation and we’ll be in touch if we have any more information.”

“Yes. Okay. Thank you.”

They leave in a flurry, throwing bags and the cat carrier into the back of the Lexus. Britta carefully wraps the wig in a plastic bag and shoves it to the bottom of the trunk. They’re supposed to have dinner that night with Doreen but Jeff calls to cancel, tells her Britta has the flu. Before he hangs up he tells her he loves her and it’s with a heavy voice.

“Give me your phone,” he tells Britta. She obliges and he tosses them both out the window, into the parking lot of a convenience store.

Britta watches as they drive through town, sees the buildings and the streets and the people she used to pass every day on her way to school. She tries to memorize them, their color and their shape and their faces, because she knows that she very well may never see them again. The car in front of them has a Colorado license plate, as does the one behind them, and in a few hours, the familiar outlines of the Rockies will be an anomaly.

She punches the button to roll down the window, letting in frigid and dry December air. It instantly smacks her across the face, makes the hairs inside her nose feel funny, and she closes her eyes and turns to greet it.

“What the hell are you doing? It’s freezing outside,” Jeff says over the noise.

She looks at him. Her hair whips around her head and she tries in vain to tuck it neatly behind her ears. “Just give me a minute, okay?” She takes off her boots and shrugs out of her jacket. Goosebumps begin to break out over her skin and her teeth begin to chatter. But it feels good because it _feels_ ; the fact that she is still affected by such a thing as the cold comforts her.

Jeff stops the car at a red light and Britta closes the window. He watches as she combs out the knots in her hair. “You good?”

She leans up to kiss his cheek and then rests her chin on his shoulder. “I’m good. Are you good?”

“Yeah.” The light turns green and he starts to drive and Britta pulls away. “I love you, you know. I know I said I didn’t and that I couldn’t, but I do. The last few months, I…”

“I know,” she says with a smile. “I know.”

It’s quiet now, now that the windows are closed. The radio isn’t on and the hum of the engine and the cat scratching at the sides of the carrying case are the only noises Britta can hear. It’s a nice silence though, a comfortable silence, and she thinks she can go a thousand miles like this.

“So where to?” Jeff asks. They’re a block away from the highway on-ramp: they can go up, down, left, or right.

“South,” Britta says, propping her feet up on the dashboard. “Let’s go get drunk on margaritas.”

“South it is.” He gets on the highway and Britta watches in the mirror as Greendale gets farther and farther away.

“Hey,” he says seriously. “It’s going to be a long time before we can go back, if we can ever go back. It’s me and you from here on out. You’re okay with that, right?”

His eyes are on the road but she reaches over to tug his right hand off the steering wheel. She wraps both of hers around it; his hands are two, three times the size of hers and that’s always made her feel safe somehow, and then bad for feeling safe, and then bad for feeling bad. It’s a good metaphor for her entire relationship with him, she thinks.

Their friends are out there, going about their days. Shirley is at the sandwich shop, fresh off the lunchtime rush. She’s wiping counters or baking cookies. She checks her phone every so often to make sure her family is safe and sound. At the end of the day, she’ll close up shop and go home and kiss them all before tucking them into bed and falling asleep next to her husband, content. Annie is in class, or studying in the library. She has a cup of coffee in front of her, probably, books spread open and highlighters lined up neatly. Her notes are color-coded and she’ll pass whatever test she’s studying for no problem. Tonight, she’ll Skype with Troy and Abed while in her pajamas. Troy is at afternoon football practice, one more semester of play in before he graduates. He calls out plays and tells his teammates they’re nailing every move. His job is to boost morale, something he does so very well, and after practice he’ll down a Gatorade (purple, of course) and stop by Shirley’s for a quick dinner and catch-up. Abed is also in class but he knows. He gets a feeling, an inkling, and when class is over he’ll call one of their cell phones but there will be no answer. But for now he makes a timeline of the incidents and he strings everything together. He uses the third-to-last page of his notebook. He’ll keep the secret even from Troy. Pierce beat them to someplace warm. He lays in a lounge chair with zinc oxide on his nose, calling out to female passers-by. Gilbert is there, maybe for the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They drink tall, smooth cocktails that go down like juice and Pierce introduces the bartender to his brother at least five times. Jeff’s mother is thinking about them, her son and her daughter-in-law, and she loves them both. Britta’s mother is not thinking about her daughter and doesn’t know she even has a son-in-law. Maybe she loves Britta in her own way, but it’s never been the way that Britta needed to be loved.

Britta will miss them, will feel their absence every day. But she is now something that they are not because she has seen and done things that they have not seen or done. And it’s okay to love people of whom we need to let go, she decides. It’s okay to love people from afar, to love people who will never quite understand the things that make us tick.

“Me and you from here on out,” Britta repeats, squeezing Jeff’s hand between her own. “I’m more than okay with that.”

Jeff smiles and speeds up a little. The car flies down the highway and they’re gone.


End file.
